Monday Evening Concert 01.07.08

Crockett – Whistling in the Dark
Knussen – Cantata, Op. 15
Boccadoro – Bad Blood
Kim – Exercises En Route

A Monday Evening Concert (MEC) is an incredible and unique experience. After driving through downtown LA, with cars roaring by and techno speakers barraging ears, one reaches Colburn School’s Zipper Concert Hall: an immaculate circa 400 seat hall, with a wonderful interior and a great sound, full of people eagerly waiting for music. But this joy is only the beginning.

A concert series that dates back to 1939, and one in which Stravinsky and Shoenberg used to attend (or so I was told), MEC absolutely lives up to that sort of prestige and fame. This past Monday’s concert “Exercises En Route” included great performances of great music. The ensemble Xtet handled all of the music extremely artfully, treating all of the pieces with the unique character that they deserved.

The concert opened with Donald Crokett’saWhistling in the Dark, a rhythmic number for Pierrot ensemble plus percussion. While this was my least favorite work on the program, it was an excellent opening number, a good appetizer for the rest of the concert, and displayed the virtuosity in which all of the music would be handle on this Monday.

Knussen’s Cantata, Op. 15, for string trio and oboe, was an interesting little piece. It has a perplexing opening, with many sustained tones, and some rather odd intervalic playing, but this morphs into a more pulsing section from the strings with elongated melodies from the oboe. While I found this piece to be my second favorite on the concert, I did feel as though it was not as stellar of a performance as it could have been – some of the ensemble playing seemed a bit lackluster, possibly just extremely contained and controlled, as compared to the rest of the concert. Even if this performance was the weak link of the concert, that is not in any way an insult.

The next piece on the concert was a west coast premier or by Carlo Boccadoro. Unquestionably the most high energy of entire concert, and well placed in the program (pre-intermission) for that fact. This piece “serves to keep alive the memory and the anger” of an invented disease, of the title’s name, which “torturers disguised as scientist” would tell African Americans that they had in Alabama for over thirty years. Vicky Ray performed the solo piano part with impeccably, it was no easy ride by any means. Almost everyone in the ensemble was constantly playing, creating an incredibly complex aesthetic – it never lets up for the entire piece. An onslot of notes from all members of the ensemble, only a few times releasing to a solo violin, only for a moment, and then back into chaos.

The final piece on the program, and where the program takes its name, was a piece by Earl Kim, Exercises En Route. This piece was the highlight of the program to me. It was a setting of four Samual Beckett excerpts for ensemble and soprano. An astonishingly wonderful setting of Beckett’s odd and, at times, quirky prose/poems, Kim did overly or obviously set the text, but instead chose to unfold more subtle allusions and settings of phrases and aesthetic. Composition and performance all around, this was the highlight of the concert for me.

I could not suggest to anyone in LA a better concert series than MEC. With performances of this caliber and of this repertoire (especially with nothing better to do on Monday nights), all should attend. Upcoming concerts in this series include “The Axe Manual” featuring the music of Sir Harrison Birtwistle on March 10th, and “The Music of Helmut Lachenmann” on April 14th, with Lachenmann in attendance and as a performer himself.