MUSIC REVIEW : A Solemn, Multimedia ‘Visitations’ in Long Beach

Music video might well be a powerful medium for mystical visions. Certainly video artist Stuart Bender and composer Angelo Funicelli suggested so persuasively Sunday evening at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Unfortunately, they made their best argument in the program notes for “Visitations,” their new multimedia oratorio presented in the Sculpture Garden as part of the “Art of Music Video: Ten Years After” exhibition.

The thing itself proved surprisingly static. Among the multiple ironies of “Visitations,” greatest and saddest was the self-defeating effort to drive a video examination of spiritual ecstasies through narrative rather than imagery.

Bender’s reliance on talking heads and stills with voice-overs--witty, hip and characterful, to be sure--reflects his apparent interest in the talk-show stuff of political implications, and misses the possibilities of the medium.

It reduces the experience of liberating wonder and hallucinatory frenzy to a terminally clever parody of a National Geographic special. The Ghost Dance movement, Haitian voodoo rituals and the Salem witch hysteria offer ripe material for visual exploitation, but Bender’s technically deft video is stolidly unkinetic, doling out natural and graphic icons with parsimonious ceremony.

The springboard and framework for “Visitations” is the Magnificat of Mary, considered as a paean of revolutionary vision. Funicelli’s deft, programmatic, historically allusive setting for chamber choir and tape holds up the sonic side with more flair. In harmonic density, lyric grace and formal assurance there is much for the analytical ear, but Funicelli also embraces Dionysian elements of chaotic color and rhythmic obsession.

He further deals knowingly with the tension between live performance and taped imperatives. As stridently amplified and inconsistently balanced outdoors off a busy street, however, that may have been a reach too far. Moreover, the audio switching between taped music, live chorus and video narrative was not always smoothly accomplished, with video titles for Funicelli’s clearly set and sung texts further compartmentalizing the piece.

Electronic harshness aside, what came through of the choral work of conductor Laurie Gurman and eXindigo! sounded fluid and pertinent. The singing was stronger in ensemble than in solos, particularly for the men, but gave pertinent and evocative voice to a score that might sustain a concert life without the inert, factoidal video.

The setting added its own layer of paradox to the event, immediately suggesting the hold a video screen has on modern eyes by offering its own view of night skies to a crowd seated obliviously under a full moon. The communal potential for a technological Ghost Dance was there, but the video-cum-shaman decided to sit and talk about its feelings instead.