Life Through the Looking Glass

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Long before composer Philip Glass’ latest bevy of fans alighted on Planet Earth, scores of people filled Radio City Music Hall to witness the 1982 premiere of Godfrey Reggio’s multiple award-winning film, Koyaanisqatsi. There, the brilliant mating of increasingly frenetic, hellish images with Glass’ constantly accelerating, intentionally maddening repetitions provided a visceral experience of life out of balance. But in “Life: A Journey Through Time,” a Festival del Sole benefit for the Land Trust of Napa County and other conservation organizations, the mating of the composer’s music with concepts and images by Frans Lanting amounted to little more than a soporific travelogue.

Philip Glass

Any number of possible reasons can be given for the disappointment. From a musical standpoint, the movie score is not original. Instead, Glass pieced together its seven sections from works composed for smaller ensembles or solo instruments. He then enlisted his longtime collaborator Michael Riesman to arrange them for orchestra. (The works are from scores to The Secret Agent [1996], Dracula [1999], Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles and La Belle et la bête, Glass’ “Shorts” collaboration [2001] with various filmmakers and artists, and Orion [written for the Athens Olympics in 2004].) The resulting pastiche may be echt Glass in its most lively, colorful, and cliched sense, but it does not possess the cutting brilliance of the score to Koyaanisqatsi.

Then there was the acoustic. When “Life: A Journey Through Time” (hereafter referred to as “Life”) was produced and premiered in 2006 by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, conductor Marin Alsop had at her disposal a live, if slightly uncontrolled, expansive acoustic in which the brilliant and percussive aspects of Glass’ musical pastiche undoubtedly made their mark. (I did not attend, but I did hear Alsop conduct Glass’ Symphony No. 8 last year, to wonderful effect.) Here, conductor Carolyn Kuan was faced with the Lincoln Theater’s far more deadened acoustic, where a distinct lack of reverberation diminished the impact of the Napa Valley Symphony. True, it was certainly pretty, and at times beautiful. But so is the view.

Welcome to Fujiland

Then there were the images. Frans Lanting, whom the program calls “one of the great nature photographers of our time,” seems to prefer a color-saturated palette that has far more in common with Fuji film than the great outdoors. Imagine Carmen Miranda dressed as an amoeba in Busby Berkeley’s three-strip Technicolor masterpiece The Gang’s All Here, and you’ll get the picture. (If you don’t know the reference, you must see this film on the big screen. It’s one of the seminal masterpieces of 20th-century cinematic camp.)

Don’t get me wrong. Lanting’s images are always lovely. The photos of chimps and other primates, with wide eyes staring at the camera, are especially touching, and surfaces and textures are often compelling. But the huge chasm between the actual color of these creatures and landscapes and what “Life” presented rendered nature many steps removed. “A testament to the magical beauty and enduring miracle of life on Earth” “Life” is not. It’s far more about how Lanting chooses to portray the natural world.

Visual designer Alexander V. Nichols went only so far. Dividing the insufficiently high and wide screen behind the symphony into three parts, he variously filled all three screens with the same image, moved images from left to right, and displayed three different images at a time. At his most imaginative, Nichols superimposed two images atop each other, moving one up and the other down. For those who were raised on computer animation, or who witnessed the brilliant, moving imagery that accompanied Berkeley Opera’s recent double bill triumph of Bluebeard’s Castle and L’Enfant et les sortilèges, this was tame stuff indeed.

Far Niente Is Far Out

Festival del Sole is as much about food and splendor as it is about music. If “Life” left me wanting the real thing, Festival del Sole’s spectacular postperformance gala dinner at Far Niente Winery in Oakville more than filled in the gaps. Under a large white tent facing an elegant fountain and the winery’s idyllic headquarters, with well-tended fields behind and around, a privileged group (including my spouse and me) experienced a sumptuous meal, fabulous beverages, and enough dairy appetizers and desserts to drain as many udders as they destroyed waistlines.

A table full of glasses in the Far Niente tent

Though hardly a wine connoisseur, I give the 2005 Far Niente Dave Collection Chardonnay a 10. The husband preferred the 2005 Far Niente Estate Bottled Cabernet Sauvignon. By the time we got to the perfectly balanced, sweet 2003 Dolce dessert wine, critical faculties had gone the way of George Bush’s commitment to the environment.

For extra icing on the cake, we witnessed Joshua Bell’s marvelously nuanced, memorable performance of Saint-Saëns’ Introduction et Rondo capriccioso, and Measha Brueggergosman’s unforgettable soul/crooner/spacewoman rendition of Happy Birthday (for Lanting). Those two artists inspired far more gratitude for life’s miracles than “Life.”

Special thanks to publicist Mona Baroudi, Festival cofounders Barrett Wissman and Richard Walker, and dinner cosponsors Far Niente and Darioush wineries. Be assured that all present experienced an object lesson in the blessings that one’s short sojourn on Planet Earth can provide.

Jason Victor Serinus writes about music for Opera News, Opera Now, American Record Guide, Stereophile, San Francisco Magazine, Muso, Carnegie Hall Playbill, East Bay Express, East Bay Monthly, San Francisco Examiner, Bay Area Reporter, hometheaterhifi.com, and other publications.

Comments

Thank you for your insightful and amusing review of this concert and post-concert events. I am unable to attend events in Napa and your review made me feel as if I had been there.

Posted by Ruth C. Jacobs on July 15, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Jason Victor Serinus’s review is right on! The latter part of the program was merely repetitious and amounted to visual filler. There are a few of us still around who worked at the old Educational Project for Cultural Heritage (EPOCH) in Berkeley,some years ago, which featured multi-media. One of the cardinal rules was never to repeat an image. You might reverse it, fragment it, but never repeat it because the viewing audience will immediately distance itself, destroying the visual logic you are trying to achieve. That is what happened with this program, and you soon had the feeling “been there, seen that”. The locals blessed it with an immediate standing ovation, however. Sometimes I wonder about these. Perhaps it is just a way of saying, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Posted by James Keolker on July 16, 2008 at 11:02 am
Thanks for mentioning the repetition at the end, James. That was one of the things I chose to leave out of my review. The conclusion really destroyed the seven-subject evolutionary sequence that seemed to be the guiding theme of the presentation.

As for the ovation, I do know that because of low ticket sales, there were a number of comps in the audience. It’s also the case that this was a benefit, and that some of the folks who bought tix were deeply committed to the cause. Finally, it’s rare that a composer or in this case, an award-winning photographer, introduces their work in person without receiving an ovation at the end.

Posted by Jason Victor Serinus on July 16, 2008 at 1:06 pm