Sight and sound coalesce in 'Move Mouvements'
Art purposely built from mundane materials is easily dismissed as something less than it is.
Art purposely built from mundane materials is easily dismissed as something less than it is. More Mouvements für Lachenmann, which had two performances over the weekend at Arts Bank, almost invited that reaction. Preexisting music from composer Helmut Lachenmann's "Musique concrète" period had some industrial popping and scratching sounds played on string instruments. Xavier Le Roy's stylized movement was fashioned for the musicians, with arm and finger movements echoing the music.
Yet by the end, these mundane elements had a serious, cumulative effect. When movement was unaccompanied, you could almost hear the absent sounds. Movement's impact on the music was heightened: Pieces that might sound merely abrasive, made more sense when you saw how the sounds were made. And when the spotlight on cellist Andreas Lindenbaum faded to darkness, you began imagining how the sounds looked.
"Salut für Caudwell" had two guitarists behind screens while two visible musicians performed movement that suggested the physicality of playing. In a sense, the hidden two had outsourced their physical presence. Then one of the visible musicians, who had been chanting, outsourced his voice to recordings heard on speakers.
Relationships between sight and sound were further scrambled in "Gran Torso." At one point, a stage full of visible musicians simply stopped and stared at the audience. Other forms of silence were explored when the musicians seemed to intently read a score that prompted no sound at all.
Le Roy is really a conceptual artist, creating a journey you maybe didn't know you made, so unassuming were the components. Though I didn't love the piece, I was glad to have been there, and grateful to Bowerbird for presenting something you'd normally not see outside of Vienna or Berlin. The musicians of Klangforum Wien, when not exploring silence, tossed off incredibly difficult music without seeming to break a sweat.
- David Patrick Stearns
