Surrounded by a sonic spectacle
Los Angeles has always been home to musicians of all nations and of artists attempting to juxtapose their traditions. Heard at its premiere on Thursday, Sandeep Bhagwati’s improvisational 90-minute “Vineland Stelae” makes a sonic spectacle of that attempt, turning REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall into a resonant chamber in which sweet and sour, traditional and contemporary playing comes at you from all sides.
In the center of the auditorium, on a square turquoise platform, stands trombone virtuoso Mike Svoboda. Behind him sits the audience, in sections divided by large white pylons, or stelae, marked with single letters, nine of them in all: A, D, T, E, N, V, S, L and I (Svoboda’s letter). No doubt some Times reader can make a word from them that will explain the work, if not the mysteries of the universe, but that puzzle remained unsolved Thursday.
Behind the audience sit banks of musicians -- 29 distinguished specialists in American jazz, Indonesian gamelan, European classicism, African drumming and more -- so there’s always someone playing right over your head, and where you sit determines to some extent the focus of what you hear. (This reporter sat near pylon D in Little India, in front of sarod master Aashish Khan and his colleagues, with the tabla players just to the right.)
Divided into nine sections by recorded passages from a poem by Bhagwati, the piece is a structured improvisation in which the players have a number of options and choices, although Svoboda often seems to be directly cuing them, turning to the north to prompt those musicians to begin and then, just as quickly, turning to the east or west. Single words from the poem also function as cues.
Director Chi-wang Yang supports the music-making with artful washes of light, and as the very walls of the room begin to vibrate, the pylons glow and Svoboda keeps turning and turning, you half expect someone to levitate.
No such luck, at least Thursday, for most of the sections are too brief for meditative or transformative purposes until near the end, when more extended contributions by Khan on sarod or Rachel Rudich on shakuhachi or Vicky Ray on prepared piano supplement Svoboda’s playing in ways at once inventive and atmospheric.
Perhaps the most conventionally exciting collaborations match the blare of Svoboda’s trombone with Vinny Golia’s heroic woodwinds and Daniel Aaron Rosenbloom’s martial trumpet.
But moments of pure magic also take place when the game of sussing out Bhagwati’s elaborate compositional procedures yields to the pure sensual pleasure of hearing the gamelan, marimba, tabla and Ewe percussionists playing softly, delicately, somewhere around or over you in the dark, and REDCAT suddenly becomes the ultimate global village.
Abra Brayman designed the spatial layout of the event, Lap-chi Chu the lighting.
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‘Vineland Stelae’
Where: REDCAT in Walt Disney Concert Hall, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles
When: 8:30 tonight
Price: $25 and $30
Contact: (213) 237-2800 or www.redcat.org
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