MUSIC REVIEW : No Shocks in ‘Culture Shock!’

There was only one culture and absolutely no shock in “Culture Shock!” Sunday afternoon at the Japan America Theatre.

Extravagantly billed as “a fusion of music and dance idioms from Indo-Hispanic and Asian cultures,” this was a program that used native instruments to garnish lightweight suites resolutely in the European classical tradition.

Though she led a chamber ensemble bristling with exotic winds and percussion, composer-conductor Elisabeth Waldo inevitably reduced such “ethnic” elements to teasers or dabs of local color in her sweetly melodic evocations of the Spanish Conquistadors, Central American Maya, Peruvian Incas, Chinese Silk Route and California Indians.

Far from a fusion of idioms, or even multicultural expression, this approach represented a throwback to the court entertainments and opera-ballets that titillated Europe from the 16th to 18th centuries with stylized suggestions of faraway places. Rameau’s “Les Indes Galantes” is probably the most famous--and, like Waldo’s program on Sunday, the 1736 version included depictions of Incas and North American aboriginals.

Of course, Waldo relied more than Rameau on folk sonorities but she proved no less Eurocentric in style or outlook. Indeed, she celebrated the forced Christianization of Mexico as if this bloody process of enslavement had been merely a matter of gentle padres winning hearts. Ai, yai yai.

Throughout, Waldo’s resourceful orchestrations achieved maximum variety and camouflaged the lack of development in any of this music. Her song-lyrics, however, were deadly, though their stale ideas and ghastly rhymes did give them an archaic, foreign flavor--as if they’d been translated into English a century ago. Paul Morse delivered every cliche solemnly.

Four choreographers contributed diversionary dances to the program--many of them ethnographically dubious and appallingly cutesie-poo. Pei Ming Tang, however, brought great charm and surety to the Chinese numbers.