Stockhausen, Ligeti, Cage and Berio at the Walt Disney Concert Hall

Our expectations for the night were established from the first moment of stage time, when trombonist James Miller came out in a clown outfit and proceeded to thrash the boundaries of normal trombone playing during Luciano Berio’s musical performance-art piece Sequenza V. Miller seemed to go a bit light on the scripted theatricality Berio wrote into the piece—for one thing, he wasn’t wearing full make-up and a bald wig like the piece’s inspiration, Swiss clown and vaudevillian Grock. But he worked his fingers to the, ahem, “bone” on the actual music, audibly rattling a metal mute around on the rim of the trombone, bellowing out slow, distorted devil-fart down-turns, and generally making strange, guttural, un-trombone-like sounds, sounds even the most free-jazzy audience members had probably never heard done: the only comparison I can remotely reach for is Captain Beefheart’s playing two saxophones at once on Trout Mask Replica. Sequenza V was originally composed for zen circle-breather Stuart Dempsey, a trombonist who played in Oakland right on the cusp of the Summer of Love in the mid-sixties, so it was thrilling to see Miller meet the challenge of playing parts of Sequenza V by breathing in as well as out, probably nearly as good as Dempsey himself in his heyday.

Next was Joanne Pearce Martin on the prepared piano, performing selections from John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes. I was expecting something akin to what they show of Cage’s prepared pianos in museums: an unlistenable, broken-apart contraption with bits falling off of it. But live, you see just how sensible the whole arrangement is: Martin’s performance sounded more like a full marimba band’s than a classical pianist’s, the mutated and plasticized strings making her piano mimic the thuds and clangs of percussion instruments as well as of strings. There’s a lot more method than madness here. Cage (and his successors, such as David Tudor) had an undisguised affection for the rhythms and cadences of “world music” in the same way the Romantics loved their native gypsy music, and the chiming loops of these pieces was beautiful, haunting, even Dickensian.

Soon they switched out Martin’s bastardized piano for the normal kind, and an entire gaggle of classical musicians piled out in order to play Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte, his original coming-out opus. The whole piece is about entropy expelling itself, something like Jeff Goldblum’s chaos theory in Jurassic Park, and so the piece started off with everything under the sun—a harp, a heaping handful of horns and woodwinds, a grand piano (not “prepared,” but still played by hitting mallets onto the actual strings rather than plinking the keys), and even a violin and cello. As the piece progressed, musicians one at a time got up and walked off stage, until finally only the piano was left to go into an intricate and isolated swan-song. This was a piece Stockhausen continually tinkered with until his death in 2007, and it’s a bit sad to think that we’re now watching the definitive version, never to hear him swap out a cello for a sousaphone or accordion.

Finally, after an arduous intermission (wherein Silverlake favorite Flea could be seen wandering about the spacey nooks and crannies of Disney Hall’s inner armor), we got to see Gyorgi Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelle Aventures. Much of Ligeti’s works have the same entropy-petering-itself-out theme as Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte, so it was a good call for conductor Pablo Heras-Casado (or whoever curated this thing) to choose this piece instead, one of Ligeti’s least-heard major works, and one perhaps best suited to a live performance. As with Berio’s Sequenza pieces, there’s a theatricality to these largely vocal works that can’t be captured in a purely aural format.

Unfortunately, perhaps spurred on by the intentional hilarity of Sequenza V, the audience nearly ruined the pieces by continually laughing and giggling. Both these Ligeti works call for unusual percussion—paper being ripped, and random items being dropped into trash cans or swatted with a paddle—and each time the percussionist would ready his next aural prop, the audience would chuckle like Beavis and Butthead. “Heh heh, he’s going to smash a plate!” It was enough to make you believe Glenn Gould’s theory that audiences should just shut up and maintain a churchly silence throughout concerts.

Still, it’s hard to slap the grin off your face when you see three operatic singers making chirpy, whispery, bleepity, guttural noises, like they’re imitating car alarms or about to hack up a loogie. In particular, soprano Kiera Duffy was really going at it, jerking back and forth like a spritely blonde Linda Blair as she babbled Ligeti’s inanities. And having heard more than one recording of these pieces, I was impressed that baritone Eugene Chan could pull off the gut-wrenching grunts and snarls required for Nouvelle Aventures. Considering that opera singers typically run around wearing scarves in the summer and avoiding any kind of vocal chord strain, I have no idea how they train for these kinds of pieces, but he must have done his homework.

It was a fine night, and at its conclusion, I was astonished to find that the whole thing lasted scarcely two hours. As we walked through the chilly streets of downtown L.A. to find our car on the one damned block downtown where street parking is still legal, I felt a bit like Scrooge coming back from Fezziwig’s party, the tinny chimes of a prepared piano dancing in my head.

Photo by JT3_11 via the Laist Featured Photos pool on Flickr.