Silverlake Blvd.

Monday Evening Concerts presents Morton Feldman’s “For Philip Guston” @ Hauser & Wirth

 

The tempo was the main thing. “Slow”, sure, but it wasn’t languorous. Some moments were animated, other nearly came to a complete stop. Christine Tavolacci (flutes), Brendan Nguyen (piano and celesta), and Jonathan Hepfer (percussion) registered micro-scale nuances of speed as well as attack, volume, and everything else. It never stalled, for the five hours it unfolded.

 

Five hours!? Five hours is nothing: an afternoon at work, a flight to New York, a drive to Las Vegas. But in terms of music, it’s longer than Götterdämmerung; it’s longer than a double feature of Don Giovanni and Rigoletto. What could possibly be the point? It disrupts the concert-going routine; it demarcates an event that’s unique. The point being the preparation of an opportunity to really hear.

 

I did not sit straight through. I had to take a break. I don’t know when – I didn’t allow myself to check the time. After maybe two hours. My mistake was failing to bring water. I made my own 30-minute intermission and came back and stayed to the end.

 

Why? It was the pleasure of sitting in dark stillness, catching now and then bird calls and traffic sounds coming from far away.

 

But landscapes are just one way of describing it.

 

It was also immersion in a tempo in which it is impossible to be willful, violent or sly. No racing, no jolts. Instead of statements there is a sounding-out. Not only no rhetoric but no syntax. Poignant without schmaltz. Not ascetic, either: discrete, voluptuous, urgent.

 

Image: Dial (Philip Guston, 1956)

“In Circles” @ The Odyssey Theater

 

 

A bit over 100 years ago, Gertrude Stein started writing plays. At first, they didn’t seem plays at all, but demonstrations of how liberated Stein was from syntax.

 

Later, Stein started composing them out of fairly colloquial bits of chatter. The phrases are conventional, but put on display without context or referents, they become strange and comic. “A Circular Play” from 1920 is an example of this genre. It’s a romp, hinting at comic goings-on between unspecified characters, and also making cheeky pronouncements about how to write a play.

 

Stein expected her plays to be produced. Since outrageously anti-theatrical things like Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique were actually getting staged in Paris a century ago the idea wasn’t absurd. But in fact it took Virgil Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts and Mother of Us All to get Stein on stage. Their success has led others to try and see what can be done.

 

In 1967, Al Carmines, adapted “A Circular Play” into a off-Broadway chamber-musical. The music and production is human scale – there’s just the one piano for accompaniment – aiming at intimacy rather than razzle-dazzle.

Carmines uses Stein’s words to create distinct episodes with distinct moods, from grave to larky. The overall impression is of a gathering of friends – one of the senses of “circle” – who, in the course of 80 minutes, flirt, fight, amuse each other, annoy each other, drift off into solitary meditations and re-combine in different combinations. They spin off into individual riffs, but always regroup, reaffirm their solidarity.

 

Carmines employs most of Stein’s text, but plays with it, so we have games on games. He selects sentences and phrases, and works them into opening lines of songs, or refrains. Since he has a good ear, they are usually arresting or amusing. Once he has found a good line – or set of lines – to set to music, his song consists of the lines repeated over and over. Repetition is feature of Stein’s work, but this way of using her words is different from the actual texture of Stein’s text. It’s an explication of Stein’s play rather than a performance of it.

 

The result is mostly delightful. But sometimes it seems like a docent “revealing” the people and objects “hidden” in an picture by the zany artist.

 

David Schweizer’s production was handsome and clever. The cast was enthusiastic, with especially admirable clowning by Aaron Jung and P.T. Mahoney and singing by Ashlee Dutson.

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