Salonen Wrestles With Sellars’ Devil

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is looking for trouble. But I doubt that it was the “explicit language and adult situations” warned of in the program booklet that so divided the audience Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown L.A. That’s, after all, the stuff of government these days. And most people surely thought Esa-Pekka Salonen looked rather cute when he exchanged his customary white-tie and tails for a vivid print shirt and pointy white boots.

But an important issue did loom large, causing some grim-faced symphony-goers to exit angrily, shoving past others who stood and cheered. By staging Peter Sellars’ version of Stravinsky’s “The Story of a Soldier” (as Sellars translates “Histoire du Soldat”) in collaboration with members of the East Los Angeles Latino community, the orchestra bravely questioned its role. For those symphony subscribers who come to the Music Center as they might to a sanctuary, seeking something apart from the world around them, such theater must have seemed an inappropriate intrusion.

The orchestra did not completely ignore the traditional concert agenda. It began the evening with the premiere of a 20-minute percussion concerto, “Con madera, metal y cuero” (“With wood, metal and skin”) by Roberto Sierra, commissioned by the orchestra and written for soloist Evelyn Glennie. It is busy, agreeable music, complex yet catchy in its rhythms and full of colorful, instrumental writing. The percussion part, with an array of instruments stretching across the front of the stage, is athletic, and Glennie has the reflexes of an acrobat.

But Sierra’s theatrical concerto was quickly swamped by the more disturbing theater of Sellars. Artistically, the director has created something remarkable. He delves deep into the meaning of one of Stravinsky’s most popular pieces, and discovers it to be not what we have been accustomed to.

Written at the end of World War I, when Stravinsky was living in Switzerland, the work was meant as a kind of low-budget portable theater for a small chamber ensemble, narrator, a couple of actors and a dancer. The story of a soldier and the devil comes from the Russian folk tradition, but Stravinsky also saw this as his final break from the Russian musical tradition. The music looks everywhere, including to American jazz and Argentine tango, as it runs from the past.

But, as Sellars profoundly understands, you can run but you can’t hide. Stravinsky wrote in Switzerland as a multiple exile--exiled from native Russia and adopted Paris, exiled from the centers of art worlds, exiled from the life of luxury that he also felt his due. Musically, he forged only somewhat into new worlds. The violin here, so crucial to both story and music, is still Russian; the jazz more Frenchified than American. The Modernism is tied to old-fashioned narrative. Stravinsky was living not quite here nor there, his soldier’s story is not quite this nor that.

Sellars centers his production in like fashion, acknowledging that there are large populations of emigres in Los Angeles who feel themselves between cultures as Stravinsky did. A new text, with smooth interplay between English and Spanish, by poet Gloria Enedina Alvarez, places the soldier in East L.A. The devil tempts him to an amusing three-day, all-expense-paid vacation in Las Vegas (“restrictions apply”). Artist Gronk has painted commanding, powerful murals that serve as sets and look fabulous with strong theatrical lighting by James F. Ingalls. Alex Miramontes and Omar Gomez, whom Sellars discovered last year when staging Genet’s “The Screens” in East L.A., bring compelling swagger to the Soldier and Devil. Tiana Alvarez, the Princess, is a sexy dancer to Donald Byrd’s choreography.

But what makes this production most affecting is the calm and musical narration of Maria Elena Gaitan. For Sellars, “The Story of a Soldier” is ultimately a story of spiritual transformation, of finding a soul in all the little things of life. At the end, as the soldier and princess drive to the border, newly fulfilled, Gaitan slowly and reverently reads cliches and advertising lines--”Reach out and touch someone,” “Think different”--as Salonen slowly and mystically lingers on Stravinsky’s “Great Chorale.” It is heartbreakingly beautiful.

This production finally gives Los Angeles an example of Sellars’ multiple-year investigation of Stravinsky, which he has been undertaking in Paris; Salzburg, Austria; and Amsterdam. And however much of a stretch for an orchestra concert, it clearly includes Salonen as collaborator. The seven-member Philharmonic New Music Group, all dressed by Gabriel Berry, and amplified, played exceptionally well.

And yet, for all that, the audience segment that was offended was not without justification. This exalted street theater is not work for a plush, expensive, exclusive theater. Stravinsky didn’t intend it thus, and Sellars remains true to Stravinsky. Perhaps all that will change when the production is put on flat-bed trucks and taken out into the community, as the orchestra promises to do (but has yet to reveal the details). In the meantime, a new salvo in the fight to transform the orchestra for a new century has been fired.

* Stravinsky’s “The Story of a Soldier” will be performed alone today at 2 p.m. $8-$30; the full program repeats Sunday at 2:30 p.m. $11-$65, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 130 S. Grand Ave. (323) 850-2000.