McKeich also conducted Megan Molina, Andrew Thomson and Robert Ibell in Webern's 1927 String Trio. With a conductor, the piece lost some of the intimacy and organic cohesion that happens when the three musicians are dealing directly with one another.
It was difficult to believe that Madeleine Pierard, totally transformed in clown make-up and white dress, was recently a vivacious Fiordiligi in a production of Cosi fan Tutte.
Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire lays out a mysterious twilight world, halfway between speech and song, and Pierard inhabited it with full citizen rights.
She relished the cabaret of nightmares and paranoia that Albert Giraud's poems spill out, using her mezzo past to darken images of sinister moths, decapitations and enough blood to keep a Mario Bava film awash.
Yet, remembering that the composer intended the work to have a light, ironical satirical tone, Pierard also realised this in songs like the poignant portrait of a washerwoman and the ensuing Valse de Chopin.
It was in such pieces that the instrumentalists, never less than excellent, went even beyond that, their crystalline textures suggesting that this is a work informed as much by the spirit of Impressionism as Expressionism.
