Review: Hipsters take over a Monday Evening Concert
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If seen on the street, Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski might be mistaken for a couple of aging hipsters. Actually, that wouldn’t be a mistake. The American anti-establishment composer-pianists are aging hipsters, who both turned 70 last year.
But they are such important and exceptional musicians that at this point in their careers, it is no easy matter keeping the establishment at bay. They remain best known for the work they create for themselves -- Rzewski, right, for his exhilarating, politically engaged piano pieces and Curran for his piano scores and electronic soundscapes. On rare occasions, they get together for reunions of Musica Elettronica Viva, the far-out ensemble of improvising electronic musicians that they helped form in Rome in 1967.
But although never having much truck with conventional ensembles or traditional musical institutions (despite the fact that both teach), each composer now and then succumbs to requests from new music specialists for new compositions. The Los Angeles premieres of three such works were the basis for the Monday Evening Concert performed by Xtet this week at the Colburn School’s Zipper Concert Hall.
The program was titled ‘American Originals,’ and even though neither of these composers was on hand, there was no mistaking the presence of a couple of implacable rebels with a cause.
‘Schtyx’ by Curran, left -- for violin, piano and percussion -- began with Sarah Thornblade playing a simple melody on the violin. Vicki Ray, the pianist, was seated behind her. No percussionist was onstage, though. But just as Thornblade started her tune, David Johnson walked out, a big lummox pushing a stool that made a loud scraping noise on the floor. It took him a long while to wend his way to his percussion setup. He noisily nudgedthe stool over to the piano and peered inside. Next, he checked out what the violinist was up to, which was playing a dog whistle as well as her fiddle.
The composer explains what he is up to in his stream-of-consciousness program note for this 32-minute 1992 trio, and that has something to do with the Yiddish underground, Miles Davis running from Edith Piaf when she calls him ‘cookie,’ Sonia Delaunay’s recent paintings, Bazooka gum, Federico Fellini, the Torah, Cole Porter, a golem and much else.
The trio is equally nonsensical and exuberant. Its nose-thumbing is funny but not silly. In fact, in this surprisingly moving score, a melody needs to survive though every imaginable form of interruption -- as well as a hauntingly soporific section in the middle -- and every imaginable form of interruption is of musical interest in its own right.
The two Rzewski pieces were ‘Pocket Symphony,’ written for the ensemble eighth blackbird in 2000, and ‘96,’ a short quintet for Elliott Carter’s 96th birthday four years ago. ‘96,’ in which 12-tone rows all but bebop, served as a reminder that Rzewski and Curran both studied with Carter and other big-time East Coast composers and that their compositional technique, no matter how far they stretch it, is highly sophisticated.
In ‘Pocket Symphony’ -- for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin and cello -- Rzewski theatrically rails against anything symphonic. The heart of each of its six movements is an extravagant cadenza, one for each instrument, dripping with character. Donald Crockett conducted the Rzewski pieces as well as the program’s opener, Morton Feldman’s ‘The Viola in My Life II,’ and the performances were captivating.
The soloist in the Feldman was violist Kazi Pitelka, and her job was to play short fragments of melody against which the ensemble brushes fragments of accompaniment, like tiny kisses and caresses, in a work the composer intended as airy erotica. The piece was odd man out on the program but is an Xtet specialty. The group played it two years ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, shortly after the museum had evicted the Monday Evening Concerts. Whatever the political significance of this MEC reprise, the piece and Xtet’s performance were pure pleasure.
-- Mark Swed
