As part of its Chamber Cycle, the Auditorio de Tenerife is offering the concert Arte, commedia y poesía… Pierrot Lunaire (Art, commedia and poetry…Pierrot Lunaire) by the Ensemble Sonido Extremo and the countertenor Xavier Sabata. The Cabildo de Gran Canaria – Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria has collaborated in this show.

Humour and poetry are the two essential pillars of this programme. The poems of Pessoa and Giraud, along with humour, structure the works that form it and are its starting point. Since music manages to weave together disciplines, we can see attitudes from creators that hint at comedy. There is the emergence of joking, parody, sarcasm, strokes of wit or in its higher state, irony; music in dialogue with theatre, with poetry, with gestures or even with music itself.

In Ars Memoriae, Mikel Urquiza uses timbre, instrumental artifice and the dialogue with other music to create a fun and heterogeneous piece in several movements, which symbolically place us in the different rooms of a Roman house, a domus. In Tão Longe de mim, José Río-Pareja adds music to four peculiar poems by Fernando Pessoa thus creating a work that is also peculiar. A dialogue in which, both voice and instruments, visit the provocative style of the ironical and irreverent Pessoa from a beautiful perspective. And, lastly, we will listen to the work whose complete name is Three times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire, more commonly known as Pierrot Lunaire. The cycle of small melodramas made from 21 of the poems of Giraud to create a work with which Arnold Schöenberg shook some of the paradigms of musical composition, in the Berlin of 1912. The language of Pierrot Lunaire floats in a groundbreaking space, a universe without gravity. Each movement forges a small cosmos where text and music coexist in an extraordinary symbiosis. A fresh, mysterious work, and listening to it remains revelatory to explain what happened to music in the last century.