It would be logical to assume that an indoor-outdoor Sunday morning chamber concert offering its audience free coffee and bagels would be a lighthearted affair.
That, however, was not entirely true of the Sunday Morning Music concert on Oct. 6 at Santa Monica’s BroadStage. Local chamber orchestra Delirium Musicum brought off a performance of skillful contrasts, exploring a range of emotions. The whole setup was inviting: The stage and a sound shell was placed at one end of a dance studio (that also serves as a music hall) with sliding doors that open onto a large patio.
The program was jovially emceed and flamboyantly led by Delirium Musicum’s founder and artistic director, violinist Etienne Gara. But it was the skilled musicianship of the entire ensemble and the concert’s threading together of seemingly disparate compositions that provided the surprise.
The first course of this musical brunch was a ballet excerpt from the opéra comique L’amant anonyme by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Gara described the selection as “surprisingly contemporary” in its juxtaposition of light-footed classical balance and thunderclouds of dissonance.
The push-pull dynamic between classicism and modernism turned out to be a theme throughout the entire concert. And five stars to whoever came up with the idea to segue from an 18th-century ballet to John Cage’s Living Room Music, with the musicians reciting Gertrude Stein’s 1938 poem “The World Is Round,” which Cage turns into a brilliant example of cubist fragmentation.
It was a choice perfectly embodying the musical personality of Delirium Musicum — the ability to perform at the highest level while having a grand old time.
From 1930s Paris, the program boomeranged back to the 18th century for a rendition of “Le chaos” from Jean-Féry Rebel’s 1738 ballet Les Elémens, simphonie nouvelle. As Gara pointed out, and as the musicians emphasized with their energetic performance, Rebel’s musical portrait of chaos can at times feel as current as the evening news.
Then, in another shift of mood, the concert devoted its longest segment to a performance of Philip Glass’s music for the 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, originally scored for the Kronos Quartet. Delirium Musicum used a creamy, smooth orchestral arrangement. In 1985, Glass’s minimalist vocabulary still felt decidedly avant-garde. On Sunday, the audience accepted it as completely mainstream.
Delirium Musicum’s composer-in-residence, Gianluca Bersanetti, played a key role in the final third of the concert, his brief Prelude serving as introduction to Mozart’s shadowy, ominous Adagio and Fugue in C Minor.
Doom and gloom gave way to the bright melodic sun and gently embracing melodies of the Allegro from Florence Price’s unfinished String Quartet in G Major, composed in 1929.
The printed program ended with a rendition of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 4, with Gara tapping into his Hungarian heritage with all the flurry he could muster — matched, though with a bit less flamboyance, by violinist Misha Vayman.
Two encores, heavily solicited by Gara, followed: Max Richter’s Vivaldi-inspired Summer and a movement from Gabriella Smith’s Desert Ecology, which was given its premiere performance by Delirium Musicum as part of Treelogy in 2023.
As Mary Poppins observed, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” If Sunday’s attendees knew that pieces by modernist and contemporary composers — Glass, Cage, Richter, and Smith — were going to fill the concert, they might have shied away. Cleverly, Gara and his colleagues made all this music less intimidating with clever programming. The free coffee and bagels didn’t hurt either.
