|
MUSIC THEATER REVIEW
Look At The Music, Listen To The Pictures
|
By Marvin Tartak
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson have offered to the world their latest, long-awaited collaboration, "Monsters of Grace". It opened Tuesday night, April 13, at Zellerbach Auditorium to a less than packed house of inquisitive, receptive folk. It amused for a while, enchanted in short spurts, and then it passed away
The charm of the evening lay in the professional video displays. Dramatic lighting, cool and efficient, set the scene. In the beginning the houselights were up and one could see six devoted musicians, including Glass, settle into an Introduction "Where Everything is Music". Darkness followed. A rectangle of projections focused on a screen behind the musicians became the main attraction. As the soloists came and went in and out of the blackness singing to undramatic accompaniments, all attention was directed to the digital images on the screen. The audience wore 3-D glasses, precariously perched over spectacles when necessary.
The program consisted of 13 items, with suggestive titles: They Say That Paradise Will be Perfect and An Artist Comes to Paint You--or even more amorphously, Like This. Four singers accompanied the visuals with texts that occasionally could be understood (I heard Jesus raised the dead at one point). It didn't seem to matter what the texts were: even though the "lyrics" were translations and adaptations from a 13th-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi, they weren't printed in the program, and the theater was pitch-black anyway. One couldn't hear 85% of the words, and the little that was audible had no resonance from the images or the music.
So what's it all about? The pictures on the screen, computer-generated images designed by Wilson and developed by Silicon Graphics dominated everything. Desertscapes inhabited with refugees from Monty Python (those giant feet); antiseptic bars of colored light; trees and houses in some animated landscape with a bicyclist coming toward the viewer on a path; a house floating down a river through various backgrounds and eventually threatened by a sea monster. (But no violence--a blackout wiped all danger from the viewer at the last moment.) Most of the pictures were flat and ordinary--a table with cups and stuff, a hand with fingers stretched toward the audience in effective three dimension.
While many of the pictures were bland, once in a while they induced an emotion of fear--like the scary sea monster, a menacing needle piercing the hand's flesh, and the large knife that came and went ominously. In other words, old-fashioned surrealism.
Did it mean anything? I don't think so; Robert Wilson has said: "I'm not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to hear. You go to our opera like you go to a museum...Look at the music. Listen to the pictures." The audience sat entranced; a few people applauded, albeit nervously and with giggles, at the end of a few sections. Afterwards on the street the subject of rapt conversation by the involved observers was not "What was it all about?" but "What did I see?" The accomplished visual concept was executed by Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company, whose forte was creating "special effects used in amusement-park rides". In substance this was an evening of tidbits to savor, the amuse-gueule of the concert world. Don't worry about digesting any of it; there isn't much sustenance here.
The second half of the creative team, the composer Philip Glass, did not get in the way of the scenery. His music was at its best serving as background. The vocal lines were simple and folk-like, sincere in tonal, white-note melody. The instrumentation was often spiced with sounds of middle-Eastern instruments. Unfortunately, the incessant synthesizer whine of the keyboards limited the exotic. Television has been too much orchestrated with these nasal colors; it's Twin Peaks brought to the concert stage. The musical style seemed to expand its dimensions beyond the usual Glass score. Though one expected minimalism, the composer dipped into this nattering bed of repetitiveness only some of the time. Generally his music was sweet and static; it didn't offend, and it didn't affect the emotions, either.
To consider Monsters of Grace a "theater experience unlike any other that has been experienced until now" is to swallow a mouthful of exaggeration. Adding three-dimension glasses to a musical event is rather innovative but hardly new in the theater. One need only look at the ghastly publicity photo of an audience garbed with these black spectacles (it adorns the title page of the program) to acknowledge the emptiness of a merely charming evening.
(Marvin Tartak, a pianist noted for contemporary music, teaches a course in Opera at City College of San Francisco. He has written program notes for the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, has also has edited two volumes of Rossini for the Fondazione Rossini, and is soon to embark on a third.)
©1999 Marvin Tartak, all rights reserved
|
