Music Reviews : Lentz’s ‘orgasMass’ a Bit Anticlimactic

Post-concert tristesse is hardly new, but trust Daniel Lentz to make the connection between musical and sexual climax specific.

Saturday, Lentz’s ensemble gave the world premiere of his “orgasMass” at Japan America Theatre, music that dares to ask (beg?) the question: “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”

The composer notes that it has been his intention “to simulate sexual orgasm in music.” To that end, he has set e.e. cummings’ poem “may i feel said he” for two singers, clarinet, violin and a battery of synthesizers and percussion, all doubled several times over through recorded loops.

A veteran minimalist, technophile and adventurer in non-European musics, Lentz is a master of color and additive textures. He piles up the amplified sound here in stereotypically surging, insistent masses that don’t quite peak as he clearly intends.

This is the musical equivalent of making love with a sex manual in one hand, counting under your breath.

Wearing headphones and guided by a click-track, the members of the Daniel Lentz Group worked gamely at their repetitive tasks. Jessica Karraker and Edward Levy provided gleaming singing and understandable text without raising temperatures or anything else--much friction but no heat.

Ironically, Ellis Hall had just demonstrated in “Abalone” the kind of free, warm singing that might have made climax in a less regimented context possible. Lentz set “Abalone”--a haunting ode to memory by pianist-composer Harold Budd--as a New Age fusion of pop ballad and art song, its cool, understated accompaniment the perfect backdrop to Hall’s intimately soaring reverie.

The Lentz Group also offered the U.S. premieres of two post-minimalist pieces commissioned for performances in Japan a year ago at the 1991 Interlink Festival.

Composer Mamoru Fujieda was on hand for his synthesizer-washed elaboration of a trecento ballata, “Doubles of Francesca I,” and he couldn’t have been happy about the technical glitches and unbalanced amplification that beset it.

Yoshihiro Kanno’s “City of Sand in a Labyrinth” fared better, and sounded more substantial in its quirky, disjunct patterns and recursive structure. Karraker sang in both with point and amplitude.

Between these highly controlled, aggressively projected pieces came a conceptual interlude in the form of John Cage’s “4’33”.” Though allegedly the first (non-)performance by a MIDI ensemble, its silence was no more or less golden than in other sites and times.