MUSIC REVIEW : Green Umbrella Revives Dada Film

In a period when dance historians are industriously re-creating significant “lost” works, CalArts forces have made an oblique contribution with the restoration of “Ballet Mecanique,” the landmark Dada film by Dudley Murphy, Fernand Leger and Man Ray, with music by George Antheil.

The results of the cinematic effort, led by William Moritz, were shown for the first time Monday, as part of a Green Umbrella concert at the Japan America Theatre by the ever-intrepid New CalArts 20th-Century Players.

An abstract, surreal mini-epic of kaleidoscopic images, “Ballet Mecanique” has a tangled history, marked by uncertainties about individual contributions and blurred by Leger’s re-edited versions. The music intended for the film also actually intersected with it only in intermittent fashion. Ironically, the Green Umbrella presentation matched the attempt to restore the original visual intentions with Antheil’s final revision of the score, made 28 years after the film was first shown in 1924.

The union of sight and sound seemed more organic at some points than at others, but Antheil caught the manic rhythm of the film quite successfully. The combination proved surprisingly fresh and vital Monday, with Stephen Mosko conducting a tight, hard-hitting performance of the brash score beneath the witty, endlessly inventive images, in a remarkable triumph of imagination over the limitations of primitive technology.

“A Desert Flowers” by Morton Subotnick has much of Antheil’s energy and sheer sonic pizazz. But despite computer-controlled elaborations, it is much less complex in texture and thought, relying heavily on unison statements bounced about in rapid antiphony. It boasts a moving section of sustained lyric reflection, but it ends with an anticlimactic electronic hiccup.

Mosko led a convincingly poised West Coast premiere, though much of the work of his players seemed more important in triggering computer responses than for its own sound, often thin and overwhelmed by the electronics.

The other work on the clever and cohesive program for the large ensemble was Varese’s “Deserts,” placed as a bookend to Subotnick’s desert images. Mosko and company supplied stylishly raucous zest on its behalf, in a well-shaped performance marked by the inclusion of the composer’s optional tape interludes.

In the West Coast premiere of Charles Dodge’s “Viola Elegy,” composed in memory of Morton Feldman, violist Laura Kuennen offered abundantly warm, focused sound, as a well-balanced complement to a moody synthesized tape accompaniment. But her effort also seemed curiously understated and even tentative for such richly nostalgic lyricism.

Michael Jon Fink’s “L’Age d’Or” is a sonically aggressive bit of unusual eye music from six electronic pianos, facing the audience as a squat, grinning phalanx. His sounds are a minimalistic, computer-driven version of a Conlon Nancarrow etude and could easily be taped, but the medium is definitely the message here--a face-to-face confrontation with the new machine age.

Completing the program was James Tenney’s “Wake for Charles Ives,” a short, minimalist rhythmic canon for four differently pitched tenor drums.