Pierrot Redux

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Viel's sound setting starts with two people, a woman and a man, returning from a night of revelry who stop to look at the moon. A soprano and a baritone, two faces of a single character who is splitting, dividing, fragmenting. The multitude of voices, which everyone brings, takes over, crumbling Pierrot. Fragments that in turn become characters detached from the original but merged with it, disjointed but together, isolated but also in unison. Particles of a subjectivity that persist in the night, in a party that, in reality, is already over but that lingers in the energy of that single shattered body, in the procrastination of the intoxication. Pierrot Redux is the residue of a rave party; a transition between night and day, a stellar interposition. Pierrot Redux is an eclipse; the sun is occluded by the moon, obscured, and only fringes of light and glare pass through the solar galaxy, not allowing dawn to break up the party, the body to come together as one. In this slow transition, the moon stands between Schoenberg's remains and Viel's rewriting, creating a cone of penumbra, a celestial shadow that vaporises Pierrot Lunaire in its contemporary ghosts.

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