Patrick Dupre Quigley rehearses the New World Symphony and Seraphic Fire in Steve Reich’s The Desert Music. (from Facebook)
The season now in its final weeks has been a particularly good one for Beethoven, but performances of contemporary music have been relatively rare.
Which is why it was great fun Saturday night to be at the New World Center in Miami Beach, where Seraphic Fire founder Patrick Dupré Quigley led his choir and members of the New World Symphony in a major American modernist work, Steve Reich’s The Desert Music, along with two pieces of 1960s avant-garde mischief by György Ligeti.
Quigley threw in a Monteverdi motet, Beatus vir, for good measure as a piece of tasty early Baroque filling between the slices of Ligeti Dada, for a most diverting evening of challenging music that went over very well with the large audience, an enthusiastic reception that was itself a sign of cultural progress.
The major work was the Reich, which at about 45 minutes took up the entire second half of the program. Written in 1982-83, and played Saturday night in a chamber orchestra arrangement from 2001, it’s a sonically massive, powerfully pulsing cantata that uses poems by William Carlos Williams as both text and sound effect takeoff point. At this remove of more than 30 years, it’s easier to hear how indebted such minimalist scores are to the repetitive heartbeat of rock, and to that form of popular music’s aesthetic of harmonic change, which favors shifting blocks of chords.
Scored for chorus and orchestra with a large battery of percussion including four marimbas and a fleet of keyboards, it starts chugging away right from the start with repeated rhythmic chords in the marimbas, and essentially keeps going from there with very little dynamic gradation: everything is relatively loud all the way through, with the occasional exception of the instrumental breaks between songs, when the texture thinned for new colors, in both cases simple motifs announced at first by a solo violin, joined by others shortly afterward.
Harmonically, it’s sweet and non-problematic, and better understood in terms of pop arcs rather than music from the standard classical canon. Since everyone in the audience has heard this Pink Floyd-like statis for decades, it all went down very easy. The choir is treated more or less like a group of backup singers to an unheard lead vocalist, stretching out syllables in the poems in long-held chords that add another layer on top of the orchestral machine underneath. Although it’s not very interesting musically, it works well in aggregate because of its sheer rhythmic infectiousness, its huge chord climaxes, and its general air of positivity, despite Reich’s intent to say something about the perils of nuclear warfare.
In the early minutes of the cantata, Quigley and his assembled forces were not quite in synch, with the slightest of hiccups between the chordal shifts, but soon the gears were meshing in attractive well-oiled fashion. The marimbists did yeoman work in setting the basic tone of the work, and when the sound engineers brought down the amplification a little bit after the distortion in the first minute or so of the choral entrances.
It’s hard to say whether audience members Saturday night will ever get the chance a live performance of this music again, and it is more effective live than it is on record. Quigley, Seraphic Fire and the New World brought this impressive score to vivid and engaging life, and if only for its rarity this event has to rank as one of the season’s high points.
The concert’s first half contained Ligeti’s Adventures (1962), and its 1965 followup, New Adventures, as rendered by a trio from Roomful of Teeth, familiar faces as part of Seraphic Fire as well: Soprano Estelí Gomez, mezzo Virginia Warnken and bass Cameron Beauchamp. These two works are echt-modernist from the period of high experimentation in postwar Europe, and as such delight or madden according to your preference.
The three singers have not a lot of actual singing to do in either piece, though there is a bit of it in the end of New Adventures. Most of the rest is outbursts of other things you can do with your voice, such as talk, cry, whisper and cough, or vocalize through a megaphone. The seven-piece instrumental ensemble (flute, horn, cello, bass, piano, harpsichord and percussion) mostly sticks to brief entrances, except in the New Adventures, when the percussionist (Bradley Loudis, who was terrific) has a fit of madness, ripping paper, beating things with hammers and tennis rackets, and finally casting a ceramic tea set into a garbage can, where it was smashed satisfyingly, to the groans and giggles of the crowd.
Gomez, Warnken and Beauchamp did a wonderful job with these two performance-art pieces, acting out a highly nervous drama in both cases that was something like a hyperkinetic cocktail party at Anton Webern’s house. Both Gomez and Warnken had elaborate solos; in hers, Warnken ended up choking so convincingly that folks around me seemed alarmed. Beauchamp got to show off the wide range of his voice, from sepulchral to high baritone, and all three seemed to be having a great deal of fun.
Quigley added to the merriment in the way he ended both pieces, freezing in place along with everyone else on stage, as if they had been flash-frozen in mid-measure. He held that pose for quite a long time after the New Adventures, making an engagingly theatrical cap to these craftily written explorations of sheer sound.
The Monteverdi motet that was performed in the middle might have seemed an odd choice on the surface, but it worked beautifully, in large part because Monteverdi does the same thing as Ligeti and Reich: Playing with the syllables of the text to make the body of the music rather than simply setting it straight through. He repeats its opening cadence again and again, and then breaks the text into fragments. It gives the music a remarkable feeling of freshness and light, and it sounded delightful; the chorus was masterfully accompanied by a small New World ensemble.
This was an unusual and cheeky evening of music, and the audience gave it a warm ovation, especially after the end of the Reich work. One looks forward to the opening in October of Seraphic Fire’s 15th season, which will feature parts of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, and to the overall lineup, which will contain a host of premieres of new music. It’s worth noting that contemporary music, as much as the sacred polyphony of the past, is in good hands with Quigley and Seraphic Fire, and we can look forward to their next explorations with confidence.