Philly Fringe 2016 review: 'Room 21'

Another surprise: Barnes’s passionate and lifelong interest in music was just as eclectic as his art collection, but hardly anybody knew about it. Jace Clayton, a composer and DJ, discovered that the Barnes Foundation has Barnes’s extensive vinyl collection and created a musical, site-specific, once-only event.

On this beautiful summer’s night, the Barnes’s reflecting pools were looking especially lovely, and the large indoor Annenberg Court was filled beyond seating capacity. Much of the crowd stood throughout the hour-plus concert.

Making sense of it all

At one end of the hall were 13 robed musicians, the Prometheus Chamber Orchestra, who opened the program with a ravishing Ravel piece on violins, violas, cellos, and bass. At the other end of the hall were singers, a banjoist (Ben Lee), a keyboardist (Emily Manzo) and an Ethiopian vocalist (Gezachew Habtemariam) who played traditional music on a masinqo. The concert program ranged from a new arrangement of “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” a spiritual that had been a favorite of Dr. Barnes, to a jarring rock song by Arnold de Boer. The musicians wore loose white robes with cryptic-looking black designs (Notes on a score?) that I tried to "read" but could not. The costumes were created by fashion designer Rocio Salceda.

Throughout the concert, vocalist Eric Rath, silhouetted at a second floor window, read aloud the contents of Room 21, listing every catalogued item by description, provenance and date. This is an intriguing idea, creating a verbal counterpoint and grounding the musical pieces with the visual pieces, but in the event it was annoying and distracting: not quite intelligible, not quite ignorable.

The whole ambitious idea for the evening was a superb one: to somehow, if not match, at least suggest in music the wild variety of creativity represented on the walls of Room 21. But like so many superb ideas, it was better as a concept than as an event, and it was all far too self-conscious to provide the link, the “A-ha!” moment when the music and art reflected each other and the dialogue between them emerged. Instead, it seemed more like a private party at which we were excluded from the artists’ own sense of discovery.