California EAR Unit in Playful Mood at Finale

When last we heard the California EAR Unit, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April, the members generally played their chosen instruments as expected. For the finale of their LACMA season Wednesday, dubbed “The Magical Cabaret,” that wasn’t necessarily so. Sightings included horizontal accordion playing by a flutist, a screaming cellist, and, in the evening’s center ring, a cavalcade of non-Western instruments on which the musicians might, or might not, claim any proficiency whatsoever.

The second half of the concert belonged to those instruments and iconoclastic Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel’s “Exotica,” which was given its U.S. premiere at CalArts in 1988 by an ensemble that included four of the six EAR Unit musicians on stage Wednesday.

Kagel’s piece is open-ended--a lot of improvisation mixed with some structure. The players sat in a circle, vocalizing and selecting from among the unusual instruments. The results verged on chaos, but just. Suddenly synchronized passages would emerge out of seeming randomness. Mock-Moroccan or other non-Western references popped up in the performance, as much a sendup of our lust for exotica as a celebration of it.

Opening this disarming, satisfying program was Amnon Wolman’s “Road Works,” with flutist Dorothy Stone lying down onstage, squeezing out occasional notes from an accordion, against a droning tape backdrop. John Rea’s “Les Blues d’Orphee” deftly mixed layers of lovely sonorities and jabbing outbursts in a seductive sonic tableau.

William Roper’s “Poem for Emmett Till,” written for the ever-flexible cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, spins off the tragic tale of the young African American casually murdered in 1955 for flirting with a white storekeeper. Roper’s apt musical language is alternately impressionistic, raging and, finally, rueful.

Video interludes between pieces provided Fluxus spirit and dry comic relief, as the ensemble danced on the line between absurdity and profundity, a dance they excel at.