“Dare to listen,” the old motto of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, was too limited for its season-opening concert, “Films and Interludes.” “Dare to look and listen” might better fit the LCCE’s program, which combined three contemporary scores (and one old avant-garde one) with seven 12-minute films. To set the tone, film/score combinations were interwoven with five short pieces written over the last 100 years. This bisensual novelty challenged eyes and ears to make sense of the proceedings, with varying success.
The concert opened with Debussy’s Syrinx to get the audience in a dreamy mood, with Stacey Pelinka’s lovely flute played in the dark from behind a screen to engage the ears alone. Next came the first and best eye-ear combo, a film by Caddie Hastings to accompany Sean Varah’s Borderline for solo cello. Unlike the other films on the program, this one had its own soundtrack (synthesized), with some of its sounds so close to Tanya Tomkins’ cello, that at times it was hard to tell them apart.
A Square Meal
Tomkins began with 90 seconds or so of quasi-atonal, rhapsodic music not too far removed from Debussy’s aesthetic. Then, while she continued, the film started in on a seven-foot-high screen on the audience-left part of the stage. It was mostly a study in small to medium-sized squares of light. Some squares showed closeups of an earlier cellist playing the music, but most contained colors or patterns; many of them moved about the screen. Occasionally, narrow screen-high strips of light would flash in to interrupt the squares, suggesting the cello’s string set. Meanwhile, Tomkins had to carefully stay in sync with the prerecorded and fairly unalterable chain of events to her right. All in all, the music and abstractions on the screen meshed well together. I found the projections so fascinating that the music became secondary, but highly supportive over the work’s 12 minutes.
Next came an interlude, Henri Dutilleux’s 1973 D’ombre et de silence for piano, an absorbing 3-minute study in tone clusters, brilliantly realized by Eric Zivian’s long and evocative fingers. More distracting than absorbing was the following combo: David Sanford’s Klatka Still for flute and piano, and its accompanying film by Erika Suderburg. The music was energetic and engaging, but the film seemed so irrelevant in tone as to be counterproductive. Sanford mentioned admittedly inaudible influences to two jazz trumpeters, and a third influence: a photograph or TV video (apparently now unobtainable) that portrayed “a particular and powerful cross-section of the Polish fans” at the 2006 World Cup in Dortmund.
If undetectable by listeners, none of these influences should have been mentioned: Why waste attention looking or listening for them? The film showed silent, amateurish videos of a ride around Rome’s Coliseum and a large number of soccer (?) fans standing passively in some European (Dortmund?) square. I saw nothing “particular and powerful,” but heard music that seemed so. The result was an annoying disconnect, especially with the screen so separated from the performers.
The first half of the concert ended with a fine rendition by Tomkins and Zivian of Debussy’s marvelously concise D Minor Cello Sonata. No film could do this masterpiece justice.
The Cage Test
The second half began with a short Stravinsky piece for clarinet with Jeff Anderle on the reed, followed by the reverse of the Klatka Still experience: This time, an interestingly dreamy film was accompanied by distractingly random and infuriating music, John Cage’s 1986 Music for Four (10 minute version). Cage famously said that if something is boring after two minutes, try it for 4, 8, 16, 32 minutes, until you discover it is not boring at all. Maybe so if you’re alone with just the music, a monk in an aerie. But when you’ve got a nice video to look at simultaneously, thoughts on the boring accompaniment border on murder. Marcia Scott was the filmmaker. Her slowly evolving blobs of gray, white, green, and blue were somehow mesmerizing, at one point appearing like an out-of-focus Monet lily pond. Afterward, she told me she filmed it underneath her bed. I wish I had had pillows for my ears.
Nadia Boulanger’s beautiful Modéré from 1915 for cello and piano led to a final pairing: the famous A Trip Down Market Street with music added by Gabriel Bolaños. Shot just weeks before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the film elicited laughs from its depiction of reckless drivers and pedestrians. The many elements of historical interest overwhelmed the few musical ones, though there was some coordination between the two at least, on Bolaños’ part. The quartet trapped in the earlier Cage plied the notes: Pelinka on flute, Phyllis Kamrin on violin, with Tomkins and Anderle.
The visual and aural in art are often uncomfortable bedfellows, with the former tending to be more memorable, like a lieder singer and her accompanist. The latter must serve the former — unless the singer is moved out of the room, so to speak — and not distract. Only in those ways will the two harmonize.