Multimedia artist Meredith Monk, called avant garde for her reducing dance, music, and drama to their most basic and powerful elements, gave the great voices of the Los Angeles Master Chorale a remarkable gift: their bodies.
Halfway through “Songs of Ascension,” the final work of Sunday evening’s Monk tribute, the singers wandered circular stage of Disney Concert Hall intoning the composer’s primitive, rhythmic monosyllables.
It was revelatory. Liberated from the oppressive bleacher arrangement that codifies chorale performances, breath and life infused the chanting.
“Ascension” began with Monk seated on the stage floor, a small solo figure with trademark long braids running down her back. Her legs straddled the shruti box that accompanied her song.
Cupping her hands ’round her mouth, this odd and wonderful artist yodeled into Gehry’s Temple of High Art. A grand procession of fiddlers and flautists entered, playing as they went, meandering for moments that could have happily stretched on for hours. Then in strolled the chanting Master Choralists — a joyous parade.
Monk’s new work “Weave,” a co-commission of the Master Chorale and St. Louis Symphony, was the event of the evening. Mezzo-soprano Kati Geissinger and baritone Theo Bleckmann, soloists, stood amidst a small orchestra. Singing a capella, they swapped turns gurgling Monk’s mystical sound-syllables to a semi-shocked audience ~ nung, nung, nung, a liquid popcorn machine. The gobbledy-gobble turkey noise percolated pleasantly, and soon harp, violin, and xylophone contributed their own burbles. It was highly coherent magic — the golden light pouring on stage prolonging the music’s reach in the rarified air.
Exiting the performance, it somehow fit to hear that rarest of natural sounds: a heavy rainstorm hammering downtown Los Angeles.
sending...