Prina Infuses Rock With Romanticism

Conceptual artist/musician Stephen Prina was once a member of various lounge bands--and if you didn’t know that, it would have been easy to guess from his performance at the Schindler House Saturday night. Seated before a ‘70s-vintage Fender-Rhodes electric piano, Prina casually turned his high tenor pipes loose in the manner born upon a sequence of tunes from the works of Sonic Youth and Steely Dan, part of a piece naturally titled “Sonic Dan.”

Of course, this being performance art, there was a bit more to “Sonic Dan” than that.

In between and sometimes over the pop-rock tunes, Prina would insert snatches from the string quartet oeuvre of Anton Webern, taken from a Quartetto Italiano CD.

Evidently, in the secret lives of lounge singers, their minds are somewhere else, fixed upon fantasies of other places while lazily cranking out those requests by rote.

Sometimes, Webern would interface across the decades with his inadvertent rock colleagues, as the lush overripe Romanticism of early Webern giving way to the creepier, crystalline wisps of twelve-tone Webern was juxtaposed against the bitter, ironic lyrics of the popsters.

In general, the twelve-tone stuff fit better, commenting archly upon Steely Dan tunes like “Kid Charlemagne” and “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number”--and a bent imagination could interpret all this as a metaphor for the disintegration of both Viennese and American culture.

But the joke wore thin over the unbroken span of more than 83 minutes--and Prina threw in a totally weird digression, singing Olivia Newton-John’s perky 1981 smash “Physical” for no reason other than the fact that it fills the gap between Steely Dan’s last album in its heyday (1980) and Sonic Youth’s first (1982).

Switching to guitar, he offered the Allmans’ “Whipping Post”--with a wisp of Webern--as an encore.