Camerata Pacifica Presents Sarah Maria Sun In Semi-Staged Performance Of Schoenberg's PIERROT LUNAIRE

Celebrated German soprano Sarah Maria Sun, considered among the foremost interpreters of contemporary music, makes her Camerata Pacifica debut in a semi-staged performance of Schoenberg's groundbreaking masterwork Pierrot Lunaire, February 7-13, 2025, at four Southern California locations.

The performances are Friday, February 7, 7:00 pm, at Santa Barbara's Music Academy of the West; Sunday, February 9, 3:00 pm, at Thousand Oaks' Janet and Ray Scherr Forum; Tuesday, February 11, 7:30 pm, at The Huntington's Rothenberg Hall in San Marino; and February 13, 8:00 pm, at Zipper Hall in Downtown Los Angeles. Camerata Pacifica is an international chamber collective based in Santa Barbara.

Schoenberg set Pierrot Lunaire, commissioned in 1912 by actress/singer Albertina Zena, to 21 poems by the Belgian Symbolist poet Albert Giraud.

Camerata Pacifica Executive Director Adrian Spence paints a vivid picture of the work, “From its cabaret roots immersed in the occultism and numerology of the turn of the century Vienna, Schoenberg's Pierrot Luminaire is fantastic, beguiling, melodramatic, grotesque, humorous, and utterly amazing. To emphasize the work's dramatic nature, each of the 21 poems will feature lighting designs and stage movement by the artists to support the musical expression.”

The program also features Schoenberg's earlier atonal work Little Piano Piece, Op. 19, No. 6, as well as musical gems familiar and less familiar by three other composers whose lives and work were inextricably linked with Schoeberg in the early 20th century: George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, and Claude Debussy. They include Debussy's Clair de Lune, Gershwin's Prelude No. 2 in C Sharp Minor, and four Weill songs, among them “It Never Was You” from the musical Knickerbocker Holiday, later made into a film starring Nelson Eddy.

Lara Morciano's virtuosic Embedded Tangles, composed in 2013 for flute and real-time electronics, opens the program with flutist extraordinaire Sébastian Jacot, who returns to Camerata Pacifica following his critically acclaimed West Coast recital debut with the international chamber collective last February.

Principal Cello Ani Aznavoorian, Principal Clarinet Jose Franch-Ballester, and Principal Piano Irina Zahharenkova are also joined by Jolente de Maeyer, one of Belgium's leading violinists, who makes her Camerata Pacifica debut along with soprano Sarah Maria Sun.

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