The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University

LOS ANGELES WEEKLY - ALAN RICH - 9/2000

Certain performances go beyond mere greatness; they serve to define both the music and the act of perceiving it. This is, of course, a purely personal matter; you cherish your list of defining events, and I cherish mine. I can never hear Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde without the remembered presence of Kathleen Ferrier as she sang it in Carnegie Hall in her American debut in January, 1948. The Seventh Symphony of Dvorak is, for me, forever anchored to Carlo Maria Giulini's performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on a Sunday afternoon in October, 1979. I can't imagine any time in the future when I will hear Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire without the memory of the way Phyllis Bryn-Julson performed it on the Southwest Chamber Music program at the Norton Simon Museum Theater two weekends ago.

That Bryn-Julson is of the hardy band of new-music conquerors is, of course, no longer news. Recordings - Boulez, Schoenberg, but not nearly enough, confirm her awesome gifts. Like Jan De Gaetani and Phyllis Curtin before her, and alongside today's remarkable Susan Narucki, she has that marvelous ability fo find and project the melodic shape in the most fearsome, jagged vocal line; to vest that melody, furthermore, with stunning immediacy through a flawless command of the rare art of vocal insinuation. Beside the aforementioned heroines, another of Bryn-Julson's companions in my personal pantheon has to be Ella Fitzgerald.

Schoenberg's moonstruck masterpiece retains its newness. Bryn-Julson didn't so much sing the music - with its dazzling, intricate intermix of speech, song and the infinity of gradations in between - as carry it into a whole new dimension. She became the moon-possessed idiot of the haunted poetry, her whole body agonized within the CEthrice-seven' straitjackets of Albert Giraud's obsessive versifications. The five Southwest players bathed her remarkable presence in an ethereal wash of color; now the moonlight-silver of Dorothy Stone's flute, now the blood -red of Jim Foschia's bass clarinet. Eighty-eight years after it scared the daylights out of its first audience, Pierrot Lunaire in a superior performance can still be a transforming experience; this one was.

THE WASHINGTON POST - JOSEPH MCCLELLAND

The most satisfying performer of "Pierrot Lunaire" I know is Phyllis Bryn-Julson. I have been waiting some 20 years for her to record her performance commercially, and nowm, suddenly, she can be heard in not one but two recordings issued almost simultaneously by GM (GM2030CD), with Robert Black conducting the New York New Music Ensemble, and by RCA (61179), with the Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt. Both performances are excellent.