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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
March 1, 2020
In late 1971 the three-piece band calling themselves — not at all grandiosely — "America", released their first single, "A Horse with No Name"; it was, as singer-songwriter Randy Newman caustically observed, "a song about a kid who thinks he's taken acid".
And while I would not insult Nicole Lizée's intelligence by suggesting that she was similarly self-deluded, I would happily wager that she has never taken LSD.
Because, for all its multimedia dazzle, Kool-Aid Acid Test #17: Blotterberry Bursst, the main work in Sunday's latest offering from the continually-surprising Aventa Ensemble, seemed to miss the mark. Many of the images being projected were either more Hollywood exploitation than the Real Thing — the Peter Fonda movie The Trip, Scott Mackenzie's San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) — or of dubious relevance: Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane singing "White Rabbit", for example; it may have been a "drug song" (and nobody who has read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — with its famous scene involving the song, Thompson's "300-pound Samoan attorney", a bathtub, a radio and a watermelon — will want to argue) but the band which played at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests was the Grateful Dead.
Furthermore, considering that the composer describes the work as "an homage to San Francisco", I'm still wondering why we saw scenes from Hitchcock's The Birds, set in a small town in Northern California, The Graduate, set in Los Angeles, or the image of the cover of Love's Forever Changes: Love famously hailing from LA.
Brief scenes from Bullitt (the legendary car chase) and Vertigo were more appropriate, but I do think Lizée missed a trick by not including the wonderful footage which exists of Neal Cassady (the model for Jack Kerouac's "Dean Moriarty" in On the Road) manically driving Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters' Bus .
So, as far as I am concerned, in terms of celebrating the San Francisco scene of the late 1960s or as a musico-visual representation of an Acid Trip, Blotterberry Bursst missed that mark by not a little.
Having said which, I certainly enjoyed the piece far more than the last music of Lizée's I encountered (the, to my mind, dismal Bondarsphere) and it maintained my interest for the almost half hour of its duration.
Admittedly, much of this was because of the projected images, especially trying to work out exactly what some of them were and why. The music itself was extremely busy, with multiple changes of tempo and metre; it was clearly far from easy to perform, yet Bill Linwood and his hand-picked players made it seem so.
If you sense a certain ambivalence on my part towards the piece, then I am making myself clear.
The first part of the evening was far easier to relate to. For this listener, at any rate.
Jordan Nobles' Einstein's Dream — May 14, 1905 opened the evening.
Quite what the projected images, which had more in common with a 1960s light show than anything in the Lizée, had to do with the music, I am not entirely sure. But they in no way interfered with it, even if for long stretches we seemed to be seeing a sort of undulating unholy cross between a mushroom cloud and a lava lamp.
But the music itself was of sufficient interest to make the images superfluous: beginning and ending quickly, it gradually slowed down to a point of near-stasis at the work's centre. Textures throughout were pointillist and most attractive; in the accelerando back to the opening tempo, Nobles even came perilously close to something resembling an actual tune — but I am certainly not going to hold that against him.
Marcus Goddard's Confluence, being performed in its chamber ensemble version (the full orchestra version was premiered by the Victoria Symphony just last November) , opened with rippling gestures which, even without the accompanying projection of eddying waves, would have summoned forth impressions of water.
The music itself employed much of the vocabulary of minimalism without its syntax, which was actually far more effective than I would have anticipated. And, like the water, it proved endlessly engrossing. The tasteful electronics added a most attractive gloss to the sound, without ever becoming obtrusive.
I was somewhat less sure about the voice-over (mercifully brief): "The memory of all landscapes, all bodies and all transformations are alive in water" sounded disconcertingly like a parody of The Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime": "Water dissolving and water removing / There is water at the bottom of the ocean".
Well, quite.
I noticed that Goddard, who was playing in the concert, had cunningly omitted his own instrument, the trumpet, from the scoring, thus enabling him to sit in the audience and enjoy the piece.
Clearly, then, a smart fellow, not just an interesting composer.
The only piece of the evening which did not employ projected images — and hence did not require the hall lights to be dimmed, thus enabling the humble music critic to actually see his notebook (which may or may not mean that his notes are more legible after the event) — was Gabriel Dharmoo's Wanmansho.
To say that this was a tour-de-force for baritone Vincent Ranallo would be to severely understate the case. Ranallo was last here a decade ago, singing Gilles Tremblay, and I notice that I described his performance then in similar terms.
Wanmansho is an extraordinary, intense, gripping and often hilarious piece. The accompaniment is fast, furious and frequently highly syncopated, with the players also required to vocalise and even sneer.
But the piece really belongs to the vocal soloist, singing (and the rest) in what is, I gather, a totally made-up language — although if we had been told that it was one of the over 800 [sic] native to Papua, New Guinea, I imagine few would have demurred. Ranallo offered a truly enormous range of vocal gestures and even, at one point, a facial expression which brought to mind nothing so much as Goya's terrifying Chronos Devouring His Children.
I have no idea how long Wanmansho lasted; all I know is that my attention was riveted for the entire duration and that Dharmoo's name must now also be added to my living-composers-worth-seeking-out list.
As has become commonplace to remark, Bill Linwood and Aventa performed all of this difficult music with skill and aplomb, and it was certainly one of the most enjoyable programmes I have heard them give — which is saying a great deal.
So, if I may drop momentarily into Latin: Floreat Aventa!
The ensemble: Müge Büyükçelen, Corey
Balzer, violins; Mieka Michaux, viola; Alasdair Money, cello;
Darren Buhr, double bass; Mark McGregor, flute, piccolo; Russell
Bajer, oboe; AK Coope, clarinet; Katrina Russell, bassoon;
Darnell Linwood, horn; Marcus Goddard, trumpet; Robert Fraser,
trombone; Aaron Mattock, Rob Pearce, percussion; Roger Admiral,
piano.
Audio-visual supervision: Kirk McNally.
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