For 25 years, the violinist Viktoria Mullova and her cellist husband Matthew Barley have nurtured a dream to perform Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht together. The hiatus of the pandemic provided an opportunity for Barley to think of ways in which the couple might realise their ambition, and the result is Transfigured Night, in which a performance of the Schoenberg, played by the Mullova Ensemble, is preceded by a sequence of music, dance and projected images that reflects aspects of the poem by Richard Dehmel that provided the programmatic starting point for Schoenberg’s music, or the ways in which that music responds to the text.
It’s a fascinating idea, fascinating enough to make one wish it worked better in performance than in fact it does. The music that precedes the full Verklärte Nacht certainly contains some jewels – Mullova’s typically elegant, sculpted performances of solo-violin Bach (the Double from the B minor Partita and the Adagio from the G minor Sonata) and a feisty group of Bartók’s Duo for two violins, in which she is joined by Lisa Rieder, as well as the third movement of Janáček’s Second String Quartet, Intimate Letters, which conjures up parallels with Schoenberg’s score. Video projections of moonlit forests provide the backdrop and there are specially commissioned electronic interludes by Jasmine Morris, too, equally dark and doomy, and intended to articulate the five-stanza structure of the Dehmel poem.
This sequence has been choreographed by Joshua Junker and is danced by Ching-Ying Chien, who, Barley says in his note, represents “the force of love, the transfiguring power from the poem”. She moves around the instrumentalists in a mix of robotic, jerky and more fluently lyrical movements, but curiously she’s nowhere to be seen during the performance of the sextet itself. The intention presumably is to present that glorious score unadorned, and it certainly makes its mark in the fine-grained, slightly contained performance, though I suspect it would do that anyway, without all that comes before it here.
• At Turner Sims, Southampton, on 19 October.
