That, to say the least, was an understatement, because the program that Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic came up with as a replacement would shake the Disney Hall rafters and inaugurate a 5-concert series of video artist collaborations titled “in/Sight.”
The concert could have been titled, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” as it featured a series of compositions by Kurt Weill, Edgard Varèse, and Salonen, all of whom departed their homelands (Germany, France, and Finland) for America.
The concert could have been titled, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” as it featured a series of compositions by Kurt Weill, Edgard Varèse, and Salonen, all of whom departed their homelands (Germany, France, and Finland) for America. It illustrated how the urban landscapes of New York City and Los Angeles changed their lives and their musical vocabularies forever. The fourth composer on the program was Bernard Herrmann, who, Salonen pointed out, was born in New York, but bore the stamp of the European musical tradition, and eventually found himself “A Stranger Here Myself,” living and working in the wonderland of Hollywood.
The program turned out to be an ingenious combination of compositional and historical threads. It connected the knife-edge string attacks of Herrmann’s suit for strings from Psycho; a series of Weill’s Broadway show tunes, sung with cabaret flair by Susan Graham (with a martini glass she swore was filled with water); followed by a performance of Salonen’s pivotal 2001 composition, Foreign Bodies. It all built up to a performance of Varèse’s Amériques accompanied by an all-enveloping video design by Turkish video artist, Rafik Anadol.
Amériques, (composed between 1918-1921 and revised in 1927) has been aptly described as the first piece of “urban modern music.” It was a direct response to Varèse’s arrival in New York City (in 1915) and captures the pulsations of its streets (including police sirens), the towering magnitude of its skyscrapers and its overwhelming sense of bursting energy. As John Cage wrote in his famous assessment of the piece, “Edgard Varèse fathered noise into 20th-century music.”
The orchestral forces necessary to perform Amériques are vast, including a battery of percussion instruments that requires 11 players to execute. It took up every inch of the Disney Hall stage!
The beauty of the performance (and it was surprisingly beautiful) lay in the way Salonen explicated the multiple voices and counter-rhythms and contrasted the structural elements of the work: from its soft recurring Debussy-like theme in the winds (reminiscent of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun); to the jackhammer polyrhythms (a la The Rite of Spring) along with the dynamic surges of street-noise energy and skyscraper magnitude. It showed Salonen and the orchestra at their best!
Illustrating Amériques with Anadol’s video installation produced moments of eye-dazzling wonder as his visuals were projected directly onto the undulating surfaces of Disney Hall. They created a cosmology of their own. But Anadol’s most imaginative insertion was a digitized schematic of the New York skyline circa 1928. Many of the other effects, however (which I surmise were not created specifically for the concert) reflected more a 2001: A Space Odyssey mentality and would have worked just as well (or even better) set to a performance of The Planets or a concert by Pink Floyd.
The cleverness of the program lay in the way each piece created a pathway to the next. The ominous, shadowy horror of Herrmann’s suite from Psycho, with its rapid pulsations and famous 24 seconds of stabbing violins, was relieved by the lilting melodic delights and clever lyrics of Weill’s Broadway show tunes.
Decked out as a cabaret goddess, all glitter and suave sophistication, Susan Graham made the most of each song. By turns she was sultry in “My Ship” and “One Life to Live” from Lady in the Dark; autumnally romantic in “September Song”; playful and kittenish in “Speak Low” and “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” from One Touch of Venus. She then performed a decidedly humorous encore of the “Ballad of Jenny” from Lady in the Dark.
Foreign Bodies was composed in 2001, but Thursday night was its Disney Hall premiere (in 2001 the orchestra was still performing in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion). And one can only imagine the enjoyment Salonen must have felt hearing the piece resounding in Disney Hall. For, just as New York City exerted its overwhelming influence on Varèse, the sunshine lifestyle and free-flowing energy of Los Angeles (along with his growing friendship with John Adams) began to reshape Salonen’s compositional outlook.
Foreign Bodies is composed in three movements that flow together seamlessly. The instrumental coloration is vast and wide ranging— from crashing crescendos to softer shimmering patterns and pulsations in the winds, particularly in the “misterioso” section of the first movement scored for bass flute.
As described by Salonen (sounding much like Varèse), “The first movement, ‘Body Language,’ is about a constant movement of mostly very heavy masses of sound. These densely structured masses are contrasted against three quiet passages that organically rebuild themselves floor-by-floor back to towering strength. The final movement, “Dance” takes on machine propulsion that incorporates the use of a minimalist-style underlying pulse. It’s like a wild ride, like flying down an L.A. freeway — an aspect of life Salonen had come to know well.