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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
Restless Bird April 5, 2002
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By George Thomson
It was once thought sufficient, even desirable, for musicians to sit or stand still while offering a satisfying artistic experience to an audience. How many times have we rued the unnecessary gesturing or grimacing of a performer, after all? Even the vigorous motions of playing were at least contained in a static field that did not distract the listener's concentration.
This was one of the ways that classical music set itself apart from popular music and other performing arts, of course — making possible the illusion of the musical work existing in an abstract plane for contemplation. In other musical idioms musicians have been jumping, dancing and strutting forever. In film and video, music exists with, but has been fully subordinated to, the visual image. Thus the phrase “to see a concert” has become so common that we seldom notice it anymore. Little wonder then that, even in serious new music, the new and hip touts its newness and hipness to the eye.
The conceit of the ensemble eighth blackbird, which performed a fascinating Herbst Theater recital last Friday under the auspices of San Francisco Performances, is to fuse the utter seriousness of their interpretation of demanding new music with the freedom of movement associated with other, less physically constrained idioms. Thus they perform many works from memory, and they move when they play. All around the stage. But take heart, musical purists, this is not to be taken as displaced rock-star wannabe angst: their press justifies the movement as an attempt to serve the music, to interpret its contours in physical space. How well this worked varied from the amazing to the embarrassing, but the music making was always of the highest order.
Friday evening's performance, featuring members Molly Alicia Barth (flutes), Michael J. Maccaferri (clarinets), Matt Albert (violin), Nicholas Photinos (cello), Matthew L. Duvall (percussion), and Lisa Kaplan (piano), was characterized throughout by a devotion and passion seldom encountered in performances of new music, mobile or otherwise. The precision of ensemble was of that uncanny level that only comes from long and loving hours of rehearsal. Their fluency was quickly taken for granted, freeing the many local performers in the audience from the usual new-music stance of rooting for the underdog and freeing the mind to contemplate the entire theatrical experience as an entity. The group's opening coup de th'atre was a bizarre group-spoken introduction to the first work. Dubbed in the program “Minimum Security Trailer,” the work consisted of four movements from separate works commissioned by the ensemble from members of the Minimum Security Composers Collective (Dennis DeSantis, Ken Ueno, Adam Silverman and Roshanne Etezady) and assembled “like scenes from a movie trailer” (once again, the visual). Ascertaining which movement from which work by which composer would have required understanding the artily unintelligible intro (or was it just poorly performed? A voice coach perhaps?), but perhaps it was not supposed to matter. Three of the four partook of a relentlessly propulsive texture out of which angles play and form into lines, while the third (from “In Another Man's Skin” by Silverman) was a jarring foray into tonal lyricism, suggesting the longueur of Milhaud without the wit as well as The Beatles' “Blackbird” (yes, we got it, thank you). Throughout there was much moving about, the ensemble forming a series of tableaux which suggested subtleties of musical structure not always apparent to the ear. The program continued with “Le quattro stagioni dalla cucina futurismo (The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine)” for piano trio and reader by Aaron Jay Kernis, a work that is by turns hilarious and menacing. Excerpts from Filippo Marinetti's “Futurist Cookbook” of 1932 were read with — I have to say it — gusto by Macafferri. This wild, sensually evocative text recounts a series of improbable recipes and meals, paired with music that incorporates pastiche but transcends it utterly. In “Heroic Winter Dinner,” a soldier's ideal last meal is evoked by alternating episodes of turbulence, fanfares and cloying lyricism.
The “Springtime Meal of the Word in Liberty” begins with a musical sunrise and contains tender solos for cello and violin, but later goes on to meowing, barking and some amazing postprandial moaning, all by way of Parsifal among other references. In “Nocturnal Love Feast” the musical air hangs heavy in a tale involving an impossibly large ham and “O sole mio.” The “Autumn Musical Dinner” begins with a storm in the piano that whips the whole trio into a moto perpetuo which is eventually interrupted. The work was performed with the music, in conventional seating arrangement. The one choreographic gesture, when violinst Albert stood for a sort of cadenza, only to sit again sheepishly, seemed gratuitious — was it added because the violinist is the only person in a piano trio who can move around, and this one just disdains sitting still? The second half of the concert consisted of Frederic Rzewski's engaging “Pocket Symphony,” written for the ensemble. Another silly introduction by the ensemble attempted to explain the work's premises, but the work is so schematic in layout and clear in trajectory it seemed condescending to have words anywhere near it. (Likewise Rzewski suggested in his program note that the ensemble had asked him to include some vocalizing, which he had thought too risky; boy was he right.) A series of movements feature individual instruments in turn, among textures that are often spare but always captivating. Especially beguiling were the fourth movement, in which a clarinet solo gave way to a luminous combination of piccolo, glockenspiel, and pizzicato strings with which the clarinet then intertwined, and the sixth, which required every sort of sound from the cello except singing melody, except for a brief flash in the center. The palpable tension of this expression in “noises” was finished off by the quiet thud of a cinderblock repeatedly dropped to the floor. As in the concert opener, the ensemble maneuvered into a series of tableaux, mostly at the junctures of movements. I did not find it distracting, but neither did I find it especially illuminating. There is potential of the group's choreographic approach, but there is also danger. Drawing the audience's attention to the performers as moving agents draws also the same attention to physical form and movement that is paid to actors and dancers. For one thing, actors and dancers spend a fair amount of time just learning how to move neutrally across a space; the geeky, head-forward slow prance, instrument in hand, looks amateurish. Also, by the visual standard we are being prevailed upon to apply, we have here two very elegant women and four rather frumpy-looking guys (with some appalling shirt choices). Hey — they are forcing me to care! If this resolutely lowercase ensemble could look and move as stylishly as their website is designed, the visual component might win me over. The audio already has. (George Thomson is a conductor, violinist and violist, Director of the Music Conservatory, San Domenico School, living in San Rafael. ) ©2002 George Thomson, all rights reserved |