Music

Hebrides Ensemble/Meow Meow

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce, four stars

FEW perfomers have tackled Reinbert de Leeuw’s Im wunderschonen Monat Mai, which takes its title from the opening song of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe cycle and was here called Restless Love. The Dutch composer, who will be 80 next year, founded the Schoenberg Ensemble and his 21-song sequence reworks the Schumann songs and those of Franz Schubert as a “tortured love” response to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, fusing art song from the 19th century with the Weimar cabaret of the 20th.

Australian cabaret artiste Melissa Madden Gray, aka Meow Meow, who assisted Barry Humphries in guiding Edinburgh International Festival audiences through the Weimar repertoire, and performed her own contemporary cabaret Little Mermaid at The Hub for the duration of this year’s Festival, originally tackled “Wunderschon” with the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne in 2009. For these Scottish performances she and the inevitable bentwood chair were joined onstage by 14 of the very finest chamber musicians under the subtle directorship of cellist William Conway. Their playing of the demanding score was by turns commanding and achingly fragile with some superb solo turns, notably from clarinettist Michael Whight.

The focus, however, was chiefly on the singing and Sprechstimme of Meow Meow, often at its most impressive not in the spoken sections but at the rich bottom of her range, and amplified both by a hairline microphone and sometimes a hand-held one. The technical aspects of that were flawlessly realised by engineer Jim Coubrough and the balance of the music was immaculate throughout.

On the other hand the work itself seems to fall – with what may well be quite deliberate precision – between two stools, so that its musical rigour sits oddly with Meow Meow hitching up her skirt and wiping perspiration from her cleavage under her arm. Purists may hate what de Leeuw does with Schumann and Schubert, but I fancy that the composers themselves might appreciate the raw revision of the poetry of Heine and the fairytale menace he brings to Goethe’s spinning wheel and elf king.