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Pictures in space London
Barbican
03/21/2003 -
Visual Music:
Steve Reich: Pendulum Music
John Zorn: Cat O'Nine Tails (Tex Avery Directs the Marquis de Sade)
Scott Johnson: Three Movements from How It Happens (The Voice of I.F. Stone): It Raged, Perfect Weapon and What Would Have Happened
Mark Grey: Bertoia I
Bernard Herrmann, arr. Stephen Prutsman: The Day the Earth Stood Still
Conlon Nancarrow: Boogie Woogie #3A
Krzysztof Penderecki: Quartetto per archi
Terry Riley: One Earth, One People, One Love from Sun Rings
Mark Grey: Bertoia II
Sigur Rós: Flugufrelsarinn (The Fly Freer)
Kronos Quartet
03/22/03
Terry Riley: Sun Rings
Kronos Quartet, Brighton Festival Chorus
James Morgan (conductor)
String quartets have their own type of theatre, a fully fluid engagement of four individuals, but Kronos have long gone beyond this into performance art. Their two concerts at the Barbican on the whole, alas, offered neither interesting music nor challenging art. It was all pleasant enough, except perhaps for the overtones generated by swinging microphones in Steve Reich's Pendulum Music. But the most powerful moments were two old guys talking, one of them sampled with irrelevant music, the other in a pre-concert talk.
The first concert started well: Reich's pendulum mikes were the most intense experience of the weekend, and Kronos had the technique and energy to make John Zorn's ingenious sequence of gestures exhilarating. But in Scott Johnson's samplings of I.F. Stone, the first old guy, what Stone was saying (about peace and religion) was far more interesting than the music, which seemed to abstract a facile melody from his superb speaking voice. You wanted to hear more of his talk, not the same bits again. Johnson's work predates a far more expansive and successful attempt using the same technique, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's Trilogy, where the theme is creation by engineering itself, and where, although the diverse speakers are looped and sampled, they also get to say complex things and advance arguments, at least implicitly.
Mark Grey's Bertoia semi-improvisations similarly took a great man's name in vain, using effetely mid-sized sculptures, neither monstrous nor human in scale, to trigger anodyne sounds and images, like theremins with added visuals. Bernard Herrmann's music for The Day the Earth Stood Still seemed over-processed rather than other-worldly in Stephen Prutsman's arrangement for Kronos, although it is always salutary to be reminded of the movie, an expression of idealism from the depths of the cold war. Conlon Nancarrow seemed likewise deracinated when his piano roll was unpacked into pre-recorded and live fragments of string performance, with analogous video. Some coherence was restored in the performance of Krzysztof Penderecki's Quartetto per archi, played from a score projected on a screen the size of the stage, as in Kronos' first foray into performance art in 1986. Of the two remaining works, the less said the better: they were not even annoying, merely gently mind-numbing.
Unfortunately, one of them, Terry Riley's One Earth, One People, One Love appeared the next evening in its place in Sun Rings, a survey of the solar system that incorporates sounds relayed from space by NASA. Riley's work is never less than amiable, but the message of universal peace and love needs to be sublime if it is not to be bathetic. Somehow, a string quarter is on the wrong scale to tackle big themes, no matter how much paraphernalia they surround themselves with.
The high point of the concert the pre-performance talk in which the second old guy, Professor Don Gurnett, an avuncular scientist and the second remarkable old guy, although not really particularly old, outlined the history of recording space sounds and his central role it. He began working on satellites as an undergraduate just after Sputnik, hired because of his knowledge of radio control systems learned with model planes. Gurnett exuded lucid authority, as he explained about the subatomic particles in the cosmic deserts. The sounds themselves were gently puzzling and mildly amusing, until you realized that these are the sounds of the processes that make up everything there is. They didn't need music.
HE Elsom
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