Xavier Le Roy's "More Mouvements für Lachenmann'

When we enter a music concert, do we check all but our listening senses at the door? Is music only about listening? Is a dance performance only to be seen?

All live music with which we engage is created solely by the physical movements of musicians (and perhaps a conductor). Those same physical gestures are produced by the musical composition itself. Although these physical movements haven't been composed into the music, they have their own shapes, weightedness, velocities and gestural connotations that become a distinct choreography of that music— one unlikely to have ever been envisioned as such by a Beethoven or Stravinsky.

Playing inventively with these provocative ideas, Xavier Le Roy, the French choreographic wizard and conceptual artist, joins forces with the German avant-garde composer Helmut Lachenmann and his "musique concrète" compositions of the 1970s to produce captivating theater that renders music visually and sonically.

(I can't predict which posted category our BSR editor will choose for this review: music, dance, theater or cross-cultural. In our post-modern world, long-standing categories of art are often inadequate.)

Lachenmann is hardly a household name in American music circles, but Le Roy has chosen his notated compositions because the German composer has sought to extract the most unusual sounds, not the customary concert fare--out of classical Western instruments. Lachenmann's additional notated instructions to create these unorthodox sounds apparently appealed to Le Roy as creating movements of visual interest that he could further expand upon as a choreographer.

Disappearing guitarists

In Salut für Caudwell, two guitarists appear briefly and then disappear behind black screens while two visible performers without guitars perform the same music through finger and arm movements from the notated compositions used by all four. The viewed gestures appear to reflect precisely the sounds we hear— sounds that run from the energized rhythmic to notes ended by stopping all strings at the fret. Then we're hardly aware of a subtle metamorphosis, as the gestures become abstracted, still following the music but offering a movement interpretation of it.

Le Roy extends this play into an octet of instruments in Gran Torso. Here Lachenmann employs guitar, violin, viola and cello to offer an assortment of noises, scrapes, pops and silences that reminded me of the experience of Morton Feldman's music in a Bowerbird series this past June. A viola player bows with the softest pressure, producing a sound that's almost unheard yet pronounceably seen. We view performers physically playing music that's silent, or reading a score without generating any sound.

Staring at the audience

Le Roy goes further, rendering performative musicians in stasis amidst total silence, as the eight musicians sometimes simply gaze at the audience, abandoning their conventional role as musical technicians and instead becoming an audience viewing us as performers.

The performers of the Klangforum Wien (Annette Bik, Gunther Lebbing, Andreas Lindenbaum, Tom Pauwels, Dimitrios Polisoidis, Barbara Roman, Sophie Schafleitner, and Gunter Schneider) excelled at some of the most challenging music and performance requirements I've witnessed.

The preparatory setting-up by the performers of their spare staging, their entrances and exits are all choreographed by Le Roy, who also employs an array of subtle shadings of light, including a memorably slow blackout of cellist Andreas Lindenbaum that melds sight and sound into the ether. These theatrical techniques revealed the often hidden aspects of concert performance presentation while also cueing our eyes to get fully engaged in viewing this performance.

Co-presenter Bowerbird's Dustin Hurt has shown once again what a unique and essential presenting agent he is for bringing to Philadelphia extraordinary artists who are rarely if ever seen in the U.S.