Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

A live performance of any of the late works of Morton Feldman is a special occasion. Not only because they can involve unusually long amounts of time, but also because they involve what composer David Lang calls a different kind of virtuosity. As Lang noted in program materials written especially for Tuesday’s Piano Spheres concert with Vicki Ray and the Eclipse Quartet, Feldman requires a particular kind of restraint and endurance from musicians. This is not about flashy, fleet dexterity or grand gestures. Feldman is about maintaining: keeping notes and chords hanging together long enough to move the music forward, sustaining its life. Tuesday’s Piano Spheres was devoted entirely to Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet which he wrote specifically for the Kronos Quartet and Aki Takahashi. The piece, which is comparably short at around 80 minutes in contrast to other pieces Feldman composed around the same time, received its world premiere right here in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s at a once important venue for new music, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

So it was a welcome return for this seductive and in some ways delicate music to Los Angeles with local keyboard hero Vicki Ray and the Eclipse Quartet. The ensemble played Feldman’s seemingly endlessly repeating pairs of chords and the cautious slow arpeggios that punctuate them in between. The beauty in Feldman’s music has to be appreciated from a distance. In the moment it can seem maddeningly repetitive or nearly inert. But when a listener can let herself go in the flow of the sound, it’s a miraculous world where the smallest changes or alterations suddenly become glorious huge dramatic statements. There is a sweep to this music that unfolds slowly over the many minutes behind it. Not unlike some of the work of visual artist Andy Goldsworthy, there is a slow, organic process of change in which beauty is held. But you can’t force it – it has to come on its own over time. The Eclipse players and Ray seemed perfectly attuned to each other keeping the conversation between them going, even as the significant pauses between elements in the score constantly threatens the whole piece with collapse. It's rare and wonderful performances like these for which Piano Spheres was founded and it's why they remain so important to the musical life of Los Angeles.

Labels: Piano Spheres

Tuesday saw the end of the Piano Spheres season at Zipper Concert Hall downtown with a program dedicated to the late Alan Rich who had been a big advocate of the series for many years and will be greatly missed by many in the L.A. music community. Perhaps it was appropriate, though coincidental, that the program featured the music of Olivier Messiaen, a composer who wore his spiritual and romantic heart on his sleeve most times. The single piece on the program was Harawi, a song cycle for soprano and piano based on the Tristan and Isolde myth with Messiaen’s own devout, yet psychedelic take on things. (To hear a sample listen to the clip below.) Like the best of all his music, Harawi eventually enters that space where time seems to stand still and the heavens themselves threaten to open up.


That the players achieved this is a testament to the prodigious skills of pianist Vicki Ray and soprano Elissa Johnston, two figures well known in L.A.’s contemporary music scene. Johnston took a somewhat subdued approach to the vocal lines, keeping them light and understated. While at times I yearned for more of a piercing clarion call in the performance, the strategy paid off more in the other-worldly moments of these 12 songs. Messiaen mixes nonsense syllables in with his text in passages with a more urgent and darker edge and Johnston and Ray made the most of these.

Also of interest in the performance was a video work by Lars Jan that was presented in conjunction with the performance. Jan took footage from two different films both entitled “The Holy Mountain” in English: Leni Riefenstahl’s 1926 silent feature (see the top video clip) and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal 1973 art film. The pieces were spliced together to enhance the Tristan elements as well as the more psychedelic overtones in Messiaen's music. There were beautiful moments where the film and performance meshed perfectly, the Tristan figure in Riefenstahl's film lost on a freezing mountainside hallucinating in technicolor about Jesus and toads. Video of this sort is always a risk in that it can overwhelm one's perception of the musical performance, but Johnston and Ray were not cowed on Tuesday leaving the audience with a glimpse of something from above.

Labels: Piano Spheres