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By Josef Woodard, Special to The Times
The Los Angeles Times original
link Sight meets sound, and it's an awkward introduction
At LACMA, the ensemble
eighth blackbird is relegated to slideshow accompanist.
In the ranks of important contemporary music groups, eighth blackbird's
reputation has sharply risen in recent years. The young ensemble is widely
admired for keeping new music alive, kicking and also approachable — minus
compromise. Though the group has appeared in the Southland, including
at the Ojai Festival — where it will be music director in 2009 — Wednesday's
appearance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Bing Theater was
its first in that venue.
It seems a logical connection given the hall's past glory as the home
of "Monday Evening Concerts." Alas, that was then and this
is now, after LACMA gutted its music program and then reassembled a transitional,
pared-down version of its former self. Wednesday's event, though strong
on purely musical terms, came equipped with a tenuous music-meets-art
package, synced to LACMA's blockbuster René Magritte exhibition.
Visuals projected here suggested the casual kitschification of Magritte,
whose neatnik Surrealism proved an irrelevant distraction from the music.
It seemed best to avoid the screen, much as we might ignore Internet
ads and focus on content. The six members of eighth blackbird deserve
much better than a role as slideshow accompanist.
Wednesday's program was a fine primer in what makes them special, showcasing
varied but always engaging works by upcoming composers, and smartly framed
by two more established composers, Stephen Hartke and Joseph Schwantner.
Hartke, based at USC, is an increasingly important composer internationally,
with a voice both adventurous and accessible, as confirmed by his 1997
piece "The Horse With the Lavender Eye" for violin, clarinet
and piano (here, Matt Albert, Michael J. Maccaferri and Lisa Kaplan).
This piece, like much of Hartke's music, is epigrammatic and picturesque,
a crisp but surprising blend of folkish abstraction and Stravinsky-esque
lining.
The group closed with its most tonal and lyrical piece, offering the
West Coast premiere of Schwantner's "Rhiannon Blackbirds," a
bright and bristling thing brought vividly to life by the complete ensemble.
With yearning melodic lines floating over flowing, rippling arpeggios
on piano and vibraphone, the music lives on the outskirts of postminimalism,
connected to the m-word but also proudly self-determining.
Elsewhere on the program, the sextet boldly tackled diverse and challenging
music from younger composers. Gordon Fitzell's "violence" is
a loose textural tapestry, a moody chiaroscuro of sound (part of the
group's dazzling new CD, "strange imaginary animals"). The "violence" in
question relates to artistic tension and conflict, an idea craftily folded
into ensemble sound and interaction.
Fast, knotty ensemble writing, interspersed with droning "freeze
frame" moments, makes Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez's "Luciérnagas" an
exciting and sternly evocative work, and Gordon Beeferman's "Reliquary" riffs
off the theme of objects — treasured and mundane — in a safe,
dark place, translated in musical terms to a collection of colorful modules
passed around the group.
A wandering eye gazed up at a Roy Lichtenstein painting on-screen, where
the artist's name was misspelled. Something was wrong with this sight-meets-sound
picture. But many things were very right with the musical picture, the
picture that counted.
Copyright © 2007 Los
Angeles Times |
