Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Partch at the REDCAT
Photo : Jeff 2008

In case the WDCH way-back machine trip to the 1960s didn’t float your boat last weekend, there was more time travel afoot this weekend in the same building downstairs at the REDCAT. This time around the decade was the 1950s with a program featuring Partch, an ensemble (formerly known as Just Strings) dedicated to performance of works from American composer Harry Partch under the leadership of guitarist and founding member John Schneider. The evening was momentous in a way in that it consisted of the first full performance of Plectra and Percussion Dances, an hour long work of music for dance and other potential collaborations, since it was originally premiered during a live radio broadcast in 1953. In fact, the performance included the recorded elements of the original broadcast such as Partch’s own introduction to the three segments of the work. The piece deals with a variety of themes based on mythology but has a much broader agenda and sense of humor about topics of life and death on the whole.

Partch was known not only for his microtonal compositions, but also for the wide array of self-made instruments he invented to have them played on. Partch, the ensemble, has reconstructed many of these instruments, which were brought to bear in Saturday’s fascinating and quite enjoyable performance. These instruments are largely percussive and string-based in nature and, while reminiscent of familiar marimbas, harps, and cimbalons, could just as easily have stepped out of a sci-fi adventure. The sound is augmented by the chromelodeon, a sort-of wheezing fractured organ that sounds like a distant memory - a sound that would play a huge role in the late 80s and 90s recordings of Tom Waits. Here it was unleashed in all of its 1950s glory wedded to versions of latin dance rhythms, which form the structure of “Even Wild Horses” the third and longest Act of the piece which also included settings of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell.

The playing was great, and, while there is so much detail and craftsmanship to admire in the ensemble’s performance, the best thing about it was the way they captured Partch’s own sense of fun in the work. This was evident by the composer’s own description of the pieces for the radio broadcast, and the musicians clearly share his love for these instruments and the sounds and ideas they were meant to express. The sold-out crowd responded enthusiastically and often throughout the night. Partch’s visits have become regular events at REDCAT in recent years, and, with evenings that are this much fun, here’s hoping they continue.

Labels: REDCAT 07/08

The EAR Unit and John Luther Adams
Photo : mine 2008

It’s been a week for chamber music at the Walt Disney Concert Hall with two very different programs in two very different spaces. Upstairs in the main hall, the L.A. Philharmonic hosted its final chamber music program of the season. The L.A. Phil’s chamber music programming has had somewhat of a rocky road since the opening of the new hall. Prior to WDCH, these 8 or so shows a season featuring chamber music played by various combinations of the Phil members were held in various, smaller venues around town. But with the new digs, everything is hosted downtown, and, while it is a beautiful space, it is a very big one – often too big for chamber music. Filling the hall even to half-capacity has been a struggle, and strategies to boost attendance have ranged from free wine for subscribers to the inclusion of visiting guests (e.g., Dudamel, Thibaudet, etc.). Sometimes it works splendidly, sometimes it doesn’t.

Tuesday didn't really work. Despite the presence of guest star Eric Owens, this last show of the season fell flat. It was a grab bag of pieces with no real unifying idea. Of course not everything needs a big concept to justify it’s existence, but the performances here were more rocky than not, including a run-through of Schubert’s “Rosamunde” string quartet and two pieces for two pianos from Reinecke and Schumann. Perhaps the biggest surprise, though, was how workman-like Owen’s own performance was in JS Bach’s Catata BWV 82 “Ich habe genug.” While the playing was quite pretty, I didn’t feel much drama here in terms of either faith or peaceful letting-go. It just was.

But, in case you’re thinking it’s all bad news, the REDCAT hosted the California EAR Unit ensemble downstairs at WDCH on Wednesday for a program of “premieres” all from contemporary composers who were present for the performance. They met varying degrees of success, though it must be said the players of the ensemble including Vicki Ray, Amy Knoles, Erika Duke-Kirkparick, Eric km Clark, Phil O’Connor and guest flutist Sara Andon were excellent without exception. The EAR Unit's appearances at REDCAT are a regular affair and always a special treat. The two best items of the evening ironically were not the two world premieres on the program but the pieces that had actually started their lives elsewhere. First up was Eric Chasalow’s Trois Espace du Son for piano and percussion with more than a handful of electronic elements. A “slow” piece about the decay of tones where, in Chasalow’s own words, “different colors of attack are allowed to resonate.” A particularly interesting second movement included both pianist Ray and percussionist Knoles playing the piano - the former at the keyboard and the latter on both the strings and the structure itself. It worked wonderfully and created a nice companion piece to the other highlight of the show, John Luther Adams’ The Light Within from 2007. Here the glow of the tones is more sustained and solid. It’s tempting here to draw parallels to the themes of light and the environment of Adams’ own Alaskan landscape, but it seems too obvious. It’s beautiful music that should be heard – let’s leave it at that.

The rest of the program was silliness that I could attempt to make witty biting comments about, but this post is running long, so for everyone’s sake I'll leave well enough alone.

Labels: John Luther Adams, LA Philharmonic 07/08, REDCAT 07/08

Sandeep Bhagwati
Photo: Kate Hutchinson

While the two most over-hyped performances of the year were playing out upstairs at Walt Disney Concert Hall this weekend, a much more auspicious debut was taking place below ground in the same building. Here the REDCAT presented the world premiere of a genuinely inventive musical theater work, Vineland Stelae, from Indian-born composer Sandeep Bhagwati. Bhagwati has trained and worked throughout Europe over the last two decades particularly in Germany. He has long been interested in the intersections between different artistic forms of production across genres and cultures producing a wide variety of both musical works and installations that exploit these collisions. Vineland Stelae continues in this tradition by exploring the dichotomy of improvised versus composed music and the tensions inherent in theatrical versus musical works. He accomplishes this by creating a piece that is less musical theater and more theatrical music. Widely improvised, the work operates within the context of a more rigid but non-conventional musical structure.

Vineland Stelae is organized around an untitled poem the author wrote in the mid-90s using only 9 letters of the alphabet – I, T, E, N, D, L, A, S, and V. The 29 musicians in his orchestra are grouped into small units each assigned to a specific letter with the letter I being represented by a solo trombone played in this instance by the renowned composer and performer Mike Svoboda. Svoboda is stationed in the center of the theater on a raised square platform with the audience surrounding him on all four sides in two or three rows. The rest of the orchestra is arranged in groupings of three to four players in 8 stations around the audience each corresponding to the remaining 8 letters. The vowels are stationed to the East and West while the four percussion groups (metal, wood, skins, and mallets) are located in the corners and the final two consonants, D and S, fill the North and South. Svoboda then engages each group in a dialog of sorts rapidly turning around and around again as each cluster is engaged in roughly the same sequence as the letters occur in the poem.

Mike Svoboda

At first this seemed like somewhat of a hollow proposition, but as the piece went on it grew progressively more hypnotic and seductive as it developed extended solo and duet combinations between Svoboda and Vicki Ray on the prepared piano, Aashish Khan on the sarode, Rachel Rudich on the shakuhachi, Vinny Golia on the contrabass flute and Swapan Chaudhuri on the tabla. The groupings began to not only interact with Svoboda but also with each other in ways that weren't always in the confines of the overarching poetic structure. The playfulness between musicians as well as Eastern and Western cultural elements was at times dazzling and heady. This is what I like to think of as the musical effect of a Jacques Rivette film where the work stops being about the contrived silliness of what it appears to be and enters a more sublime world with a language, economy, and beauty all its own. It was a wonderful evening as the 90 uninterrupted minutes flashed by seeming all too briefly. Three sold-out crowds were lucky enough to hear the piece which will hopefully have a life elsewhere outside of the REDCAT. But for those who want another local taste of Baghwati’s work, you’re in luck – Vicki Ray is scheduled to perform Inside a Native Land, a work based on the same poem and similar structure, next week during her Piano Spheres recital at the Zipper Concert Hall on Tuesday November 13th.

Labels: REDCAT 07/08

Djodjo Kazadi, left, Papy Ebotani and Faustin Linyekula
Photo: Alex Gallardo/LAT 2007

Down in the basement of the Walt Disney Concert Hall this weekend, the good folks at REDCAT were hosting an international theater "festival" all their own with no major celebrities or giant sets. On offer instead was a visually arresting dance/theater work straight out of the Congo – or perhaps more appropriately, the Democratic Republic of Congo. But as Faustin Linyekula and his troop might themselves suggest in Festival of Lies, where in fact they are from may be a matter of some debate. The piece is concerned with perhaps one of the most socio-politically fractured regions in the world and the shifting nature of identity in such an environment. Linyekula and his fellow dancers, Papy Ebotani and Djodjo Kazadi, spend much of the evening pressing against and piling on top of one another in a dark and empty space broken only by 10 or so mobile fluorescent lights that are variously arranged in geometric patterns on the floor or carried and piled amongst the dancers limbs in various arrangements. All of this is coordinated with audio from a live house band, and numerous outtakes from a century of political speeches from the likes of Mobutu, Kabila, Lumumba and various Belgian authorities whose translated texts were projected on the blank walls of the space. This relentless source of distress was intermittently broken by the free verse of Marie-Louise Bibish Mumbu who also appeared walking back and forth across the action without actually participating in the dancing. Her humorous and insightful reflections on daily life in Kinshasa provided a stark contrast to the relentless diatribes of disembodied talking heads.

Of course Festival of Lies is a study in contrasts in and of itself. While actively incorporating the standoffish elements of the Western avant-garde, Linyekula sets the dance floor with small tables and an open bar with drinks and food, which the audience is encouraged to use throughout the performance. With the house band playing at breaks, the space is both theater and local club simultaneously. The piece is at once jarring, and crescendos to a more and more physically aggressive combat style but ends as a big dance party, the audience joining the performers in a feel-good conga line. Strangely, it almost all works despite a near derailment. After nearly two hours of these proceedings, the work suddenly changes tactics going from a more esoteric dance work into a more didactic and polemic theater piece. The dancers stop and Linyekula rolls out a giant table piled with baby doll pieces and limbs, which he and the other performers stack, move, and restack as he ponders a hypothetical meeting between Congo’s leaders past and present. Suddenly the subtlety is lost and the spell is broken.

Still, there is too much worthwhile to dismiss everything out of hand for the crash landing. Linyekula’s examination of the shifting and conflicted nature of identity in a land whose history is constantly rewritten often at the point of a colonizer or despot’s gun is both sobering and aesthetically pleasing. There are some moments of seeming deference to the leadership of Lumumba in the 60s, but there are no easy outs here. Festival of Lies will be presented throughout the West this Fall and is worth a visit.

Labels: REDCAT 07/08