I often hear the complaint among my more visually-oriented friends that there’s "nothing to look at" when they go to a classical concert. Certain institutions, like the LA Philharmonic or Zankel Hall, employ stage lighting attuned to the music, with often powerful results. But, few have gone so far as the Brooklyn Philharmonic, which this season has embraced a fully theatrical approach to music-making. In December, they presented Tan Dun’s The Gate: a demanding 70 minute work for orchestra that uses live video to project larger than life images of the soloists onto a massive screen.
This past weekend, the Brooklyn Phil presented John Corigliano’s Pied Piper Fantasy (1982), in a new staging by Target Margin Theater, best known for its modern interpretations of literary classics such as Goethe’s Faust. Corigliano, who writes mostly tonal, accessible music, is another composer celebrating a landmark birthday this year: his 70th.
Pied Piper Fantasy –technically a flute concerto – makes unprecedented demands on the soloist, requiring them to perform a difficult solo line while parading up and down the aisles of the auditorium. Aussie Alexa Still filled the role admirably, playing the role of the Pied Piper to the hilt. Target Margin contributed a pack of black-clad performers with red LED lights for eyes that emerged from the orchestra pit and encircled Still. A scrim behind the orchestra projected a mixed palette of colors and other effects. In the final scene, children flutists planted throughout the audience rose and joined Still onstage, who proceeded to parade them around the auditorium and out into the lobby. Corigliano joined Still, director David Herskovits and Brooklyn Phil Music Director Michael Christie onstage for a rousing ovation.
The Brooklyn Phil followed it up with a solid, if muted performance of Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique (1830): a colorful hour-long work written when he was 27 and madly in love. It sounds nothing like the contemporaneous works of Beethoven and Schubert, perhaps in part because he wrote it under the influence of opium: a sort of nineteenth century Sgt. Pepper’s. This, too, is music that would have benefited from a visual analog: puppeteer Basil Twist’s brilliant 1998 producation used abstract shapes submerged in a water-filled tank to create a hallucinatory experience.
I was almost shut out of the Youngbloods aftershow upstairs at BAM Cafe thanks to some overzealous door people, but I did make it inside in time to catch the sax-and-drum Yesaroun’ Duo perform "Eight Songs" by Corigliano’s former student Jefferson Friedman. Friedman transcribed these songs, all by the former hardcore outfit Crom-Tech, for saxophone and drums, with drummer Sam Solomon supplying the screeching, indecipherable vocals. It was wild, feral, and delicious: go ahead and take a listen.
Corigliano ate it up, joining Friedman and other former students Nico Muhly and Mason Bates onstage in one of the rat caps from Pied Piper. Hey, why the hell not?