For this year’s Adelaide Festival, Kim Williams has curated a fascinating cycle of concerts at UKARIA Cultural Centre, pitting 20th-century European masterpieces with the finest chamber works from the finest of Australian composers from Grainger through to Elena Kats-Chernin.

This program at Adelaide Town Hall, which is planned around Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal cabaret masterpiece, Pierrot Lunaire (1912), provides a snapshot of the concerts to be heard this weekend within the ideal acoustics of UKARIA as part of Williams’ Incredible Floridas: Chamber Landscapes series.

Jessica Aszodi

It was the doyenne of avant-garde vocalism, the divine mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, who stated that modern music had been defined by works whose model was Pierrot Lunaire – a work which somehow broke down the distinctions between singing, acting and declamation. It is a difficult piece for the singer to bring off successfully as its sprechstimme, the pitched narrative style, is often at best approximate in performances both live and recorded – with the diseuse often unattractively swooping up or down to the required note.

The mezzo Jessica Aszodi is an all too rare example of an artist totally at home and at ease within this difficult work. Not...