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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
November 30, 2012
In describing Murderous Little World as "Experimental Music Theatre", composer Linda Bouchard invokes not just the worlds of music and drama, but also that of the physical sciences.
And, as any scientiest will tell you, an experiment is quite likely not to succeed, or at the very least, to give results other than those which were expected.
I would not venture to guess precisely what effect Bouchard was expecting Murderous Little World (hereinafter abbrevieated to MLW) to have on its audience, but I suspect that its effect on at least one member was not exactly as planned.
No doubt part of the problem is that I have something of an inbuilt resistance to "multimedia" events like this. There was a large screen at the back of the stage, but were the images projected on it meant to be commentary on the music or vice-versa?
There were, admittedly, moments when the images exercised a sort of fascination - I am thinking in particular of the live images of the musicians which appeared from time to time, or the film of the young woman wing-walking on a biplane.
But I have to say that much of what was projected seemed mere distraction - and we have all, surely, seen quite enough film of rioters battling with police and vehicles ablaze on the streets.
Then we come to the other non-musical component, the poetry of Anne Carson. I claim no expertise whatsoever when it comes to modern poetry, but some of it I enjoyed, some of I thought pretentious in the extreme, and some of it merely baffled me: is "Epitaph: Evil" an attempt to write a modern Zen koan or a parody of one?
Let us, then, focus the remainder of this review on the music and the performance of same.
Bouchard is clearly a composer of considerable inventiveness, there were many memorable passages - and they must have been memorable, for the lighting in the hall was so low as to render my notebook invisible; and the live electronics (in the hands of Bouchard herself) were very well judged, neither dominating nor subservient to the instruments themselves.
The playing - and vocalising - of the three members of Bellow and Brass was quite stunning, whether playing their instruments as their makers intended or otherwise (and there was quite a bit of otherwise).
For me, as always, the music was far more important than anything else and, fortunately, it was good enough to maintain my interest for the 70-minute duration of the work. Perhaps the outstanding moments were there the insane gamelan effect produced by Joseph Petric and Eric Vaillancourt assaulting the inside of the piano while Guy Few hammered out a spiky ostinato on the keyboard. Was the piano itself prepared? or was that the result of the electronics? Impossible to tell, but I loved the result.
The "First Chaldaic Oracle" section, in which the three pursued each other around the stage, haranguing each other with the text of the poem was also great fun and, I suspect, far from easy to perform.
It this review seems unable to make up its mind about MLW, it is because its author is in a similar situation. Musically I am in little doubt and, while I may have felt irritation and frustration at certain aspects of the work, it did maintain my interest throughout its length.
And it was not, thank heaven and despite what some people claimed, an opera - for which relief, much thanks.
But I could not help but feel that the music was the best part and could - nay should - have been allowed to speak for itself.
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