Tuesday night at Green Umbrella, Gloria Cheng and the L.A. Phil ensemble played John Cage’s 1951 Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra.
The featured instrument is not celebrated but humiliated. Instead of a piano’s rich sonority, there were raspy and percussive taps that clang out of tune. Instead of exciting extended passages—which Cage had been writing three years earlier—a few phrases that abruptly cease.
The orchestra contributes pulverized expression, pulverized gesture and feeling. Expression smashed to a few rarified fragments.
The effect is dry rather than exquisite. It is sober and sharp. The momentary outburst from radio isn’t amusing—it makes you jump out of your seat.
As the piece progresses, the phrases become briefer, more abrupt, and isolated by longer and longer silences. At the end, the conductor Jeffrey Milarski was gracefully signaling the beat in the noiseless air.
At intermission, A Certain Person remarked, “I know you loved it, but for me it was water torture.”
“Torture” is extreme, but certainly music, here, is not entertainment but an extraordinary situation contrived to evoke the truth. I detect the influence of the moral earnestness of his teacher Schoenberg, and, ultimately Beethoven. Music engaged not as a way of amusing audiences, but of castigating them. Confronting them.
I don’t want to reduce it to a symptom of the post-war blues, but it’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a work taking place among ruins. The toys are broken; the game is spoiled: it is finished. The music of mere distraction and reconciliation can’t go on.
It made the Stockhausen Five Star Signs that preceded it seem like Richard-Straussian divertimenti. They were short, sharp and delicious. Mark Swed in the Times called it, “maybe the worst and least characteristic music Stockhausen ever wrote.” Maybe the fact that it was not characteristic is what appeals to me, but I liked it a lot.
The world premiere of Oscar Bettison’s Livre des Sauvages offered lots of sound effects lifted from fifty-year-old scores by Messiaen, which is not entirely a bad thing (dreamy French horn solos).
Unfortunately it also included moments when the first violinist and violist had to play slashing virtuoso passages while stomping on air pumps to make toy melodicas wheeze into carefully positioned individual microphones. A bit of levity was welcome at this point, but the effort seemed a waste.
But the athletic champion of the evening was Mark Robson on keyboards, who had to dash between a grand piano, a toy piano, and an electric keyboard schlepping his copy of the score. The Esa-Pekka Foundation that commissioned this piece couldn’t pay for two extra photocopies?
I confess I’m totally out of it, but may I ask what was up with the extraordinary turnout of gay men in the audience? I realize the Phil is clever at promotions, but did they sell it as a White Party afterparty? What’s next, Difficult Music Night at the Abbey?
[Illustration: Gérard Castello-Lopes]
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