Diverse in its streams and destinations, the city becomes, at a moment of crisis, home to a vast ‘we’.

the Pierpont Morgan Library

Pierrot lunaire always sounds strange. Its voice—the voice of the soloist who declaims elegantly crafted nightmare poems in a manner between speech and song—comes from somewhere unfamiliar, a place known only to this piece. The voice speaks of sexual obsession, cruelty and blasphemy, of lurid visions and black practical jokes. It does not seem to have heard of normal behaviour, nor does it take the bizarre events and feelings it describes entirely seriously. A psychiatrist might want to describe it as the voice of a paranoid.

If this is madness, though, there is method in it. On Tuesday evening at the Pierpont Morgan Library, in a performance conducted by James Levine, the accompanying music for mixed quintet sounded as weird as it has to, but also lustrous and suave a lot of the time. Schoenberg's sense of instrumental character and colour was very much in evidence, whether in Rafael Figueroa's grand phrases on the cello or Mike Parloff's cool flute tones and spiky piccolo. The performance also had the special benefit of Peter Serkin at the piano, crisp and crystalline in the high register to which Schoenberg often resorts at the mention of moonlight or glass in the poems, rock hard, enclosed and solid in the bass.