The programme began with Philip Glass’ Prelude from Akhnaten. As you would expect from Glass, this was a piece of interlocking repeating phrases with variations. “You’d have loved it” I heard someone saying on his mobile after, “it was like house music” , but the interesting thing for me was the subtle differences between this and electronic music. The way the phases were mixed in never quite followed the beat, there was arrhythmia, syncopation, sometimes it would come in on the one as James Brown might have said. The syncopation was what most interested me, the way notes came in a touch early or a touch late – was this in the score, or was this interpretation by the orchestra?
The second piece was Arcana by Edgard Varèse, but before it began, the conductor, Marin Alsop, gave us a talk about the piece. She was wonderfully sardonic. Varèse, she told us, only wrote 12 pieces, and once we had heard this we would know why. She got the orchestra playing snippets and themes to help us understand the construction of the piece. Varèse, she told us, was the 13 year old Frank Zappa’s favourite composer. I don’t know how unusual it was to give such a talk, but what a great idea, especially for an event like this which was designed (as you will see) to get all sorts of punters in. It took a few moments for my ears to adjust to the piece, but once they did, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I could see why Zappa liked it, it kind of rocked. A vast number of percussionists played all sorts of instruments, clappers, bongos, gongs, those Latin American things you scrape a stick across.
For the second half we donned our 3D glasses (oh yes) and settled down for The Rite of Spring. In the corner, a lone dancer, the lovely Julia Mach, performed in a grey box (another box!!). The images were treated live by digital artist Klaus Obermaier with technology from the Ars Electronica Futurelab and projected in 3D on a giant screen above our heads.
The 3D effects were astonishing. As Julia Mach waved her hand in the air, invisible slipstreams were rendered in thick red marks on the screen, and began to rotate around her onscreen avatar, faster and faster, sweeping over our heads, until they started to unravel and dissolve. Her avatar elongated and crawled towards us through the air, or was tossed on the choppy waters of a virtual sea. As the piece reached its climax, the vibrating molecules of the avatar’s flesh loosened their gravitational hold on each other and pixellated and exploded into galaxies of stars (a counterpiece to Gormley’s exploded Matrices).
Unlike much vj type video work (see earlier reviews of Optronica and Turning), the images were quite subtle – there was no bombardment or overload of visual stimulation. Some of it was even quite spare.
There are some buts mind you. I thought it was great on its own terms, but equally I would have been more than happy just to watch the remarkably sexy Julia Mach on her own.
The visuals were not really an attempt to recreate the narrative of the piece, but rather existed as their own improvisation from the music.
And it must be said, the orchestra were brilliant!
It’s been fun watching the newspapers struggle to know how to review the work. The Telegraph sent along their music critic, the Guardian their dance critic, neither seemed to have quite the range to be able to review the event properly. They lacked a Grebson, a polyglot polymouth prepared to spend a very long afternoon sucking it all in and spitting it out for you, my lucky one and a half readers.
No comments:
Post a Comment