Last night the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) live-streamed the world premiere of “Spun Light,” a “distanced concerto” for violin with quintet accompaniment. What made the concerto “distanced” was that all six performers recorded their respective parts individually; and the composition was as much a product of skilled mixing of the recorded content as of the score written by composer Mark Winges. Indeed, the solo violinist Hrabba Atladottir was so “distanced” that she recorded her part in Reykjavik, capital of her native Iceland. (Atladottir lives in Berkeley but seems to be waiting out the pandemic in Iceland.) The other five parts were recorded separately by Stacey Pelinka (flute and alto flute), Phyllis Kamrin (viola), Leighton Fong (cello), Michel Taddei (bass), and Allegra Chapman (piano and toy piano).
A “full ensemble” image of performers (clockwise from upper left) Hrabba Atladottir, Michel Taddei, Stacey Pelinka, Leighton Fong, Phyllis Kamrin, and Allegra Chapman (from the YouTube video of the performance being discussed)
What made the performance particularly interesting is that all six of the performers were recorded on video, as well as audio. Guðrun Olafsdottir in Reykjavík and Taylor Joshua Rankin in Oakland then collaborated on realizing Winges’ score through imaginative editing of the musicians playing their respective parts. Initially, the viewer might have thought that this would amount to little more than a Zoom-like viewing experience; but the result of all that editing was far more compelling. The “windows” of the individual players were deployed in a variety of layout configurations, each of which reflected a different aspect of the relationship between soloist and ensemble.
The duration of the concerto was less than twenty minutes. It was divided into three movements, entitled, respectively, “The Pink Echoes of a Sunrise,” “Seeking the Moon Dust,” and “We have Danced This Dance Before.” I have to say that the titles themselves were not particularly reinforced by the video account; but I definitely appreciated that the dimmer qualities of moonlight were realized through black-and-white imagery, contrasting with the “natural” colors of the outer movements. I might go as far as to say that the video content had less to to with any reflections on light suggested by the titles and more do to with capturing (or, perhaps, synthesizing) the immediateness of interaction among all six of the performers. This probably had as much to do with audio editing as with video design; but there was a clear sense of the immediacy of a chamber ensemble, even if that immediacy turned out to be an artifact of skilled editing.
The good news is that the live-streamed performance has now been uploaded as a YouTube video. It is one of those artifacts that deserves multiple viewing experiences. Through the imaginative editing, one can appreciate the techniques through which the layout of the images reflects the performance element of realizing the marks that Winges committed to paper (a few of which make an appearance towards the end of the final movement). The entire “product” is the result of highly imaginative approaches to composition, capture, and editing, suggesting that a new genre is emerging in which “distanced performance” is more about performance and less about distance.
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