The Katzen Arts Centers' Oct. 14 inaugural performance went on in front of a capacity crowd in the Abramson Family Recital Hall. The concert, titled "The American Five" for the five AU faculty composers that were part of it, featured a plethora of diverse instrumentation, synthesized musical technology and even a politically charged presentation, making for an engaging but often uneven performance.
The show began on an energetic but musically harsh note with the performance of "Juggernaut" by Paul Oehlers. This piece combined the musicianship of cellist William Jason Raynovich with the synthesized notes of a Ptolemaic Magic Square. Oehlers constructed "Juggernaut" by selecting routes through a magic square (a series of numbers arranged so that the sum of each row, column and diagonal are the same amount) and assembling them to form a structure for the piece. This work, while fascinating to study academically because of its connection between math and music, did not translate well to the stage. The notes were often cruel for the ears, the melody was difficult to follow and the rhythm was wildly sporadic, making the duration of the piece feel like a noisy fusion of a novice cellist trying to create sounds while a synthesized piano intermittently punctuated the high, scratchy notes on the strings. To those accustomed to the structured melodies and rhythms of classical string works, it was difficult to get used to this type of sound.
The second and third works, by Haig Mardirosian and Fernando Benadon, represented a return to musical normality with a lovely poetry-inspired musical duet between tenor and piano and three brief pieces for violin, cello and bass clarinet. These pieces were received well by the audience, and with due cause.
After the intermission, however, the show became mired in perhaps its most ambitious yet most inappropriate work of the evening. Randall Packer, the secretary-at-large of the U.S. Department of Arts and Technology, made use of the visual equipment in the Abramson Family Recital Hall to feature two excerpts from his work in progress, "A Season In Hell: A Video Opera for Perilous Times in Post-Apocalyptic America." The first excerpt featured the music of Richard Wagner's "Liebestod" as the background to slow-motion passages of George Bush's 2004 State of the Union address. In the program notes, Packer explained the connection of the "Liebestod," a tale of two lovers brought together by love and death, as analogous to the one in the video passages that showed an Iraqi woman embracing the mother of a U.S. soldier who was killed in Iraq.
The connection held true in the video presentation, but this was not enough to stem the feeling of a liberal political bias creeping into the concert. Several people left during the showing of the opera and did not return, possibly out of disgust for the material. Other audience members laughed and cheered loudly at points in the show where Bush and his administration seemed to be not-so-subtly ridiculed by the filmmaker. It was clear by the end of the excerpt that, no matter what Packer's intent, there was an uncomfortable tension in the concert hall. This seemed unnecessary for a night that was supposed to be uniting people for the first performance in Katzen, not embroiling them into political food-for-thought in a city suffering from no shortage of it. By the time Jerzy Sapieyevski played a finale that featured piano and computer parts, the crowd had greatly thinned and those who remained were left to ponder what they had seen after an interesting but sometimes confusing two-hour show.
"The American Five" performance was not a classical display of music by any stretch of the imagination, but each of the composers took challenges in their compositions. This created a concert that exhibited the progressiveness of the American University music department and showed the faculty will make the Katzen Arts Center known as a performance space willing to take risks in the future. These risks didn't always work out during the concert, but it was refreshing to see a performing arts department at a university known more for its schools of international relations and public affairs prove it clearly deserves to be paid as much attention as the brand new building it now calls home.
