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Friday, April 29, 2005
The Mars Volta at the Tabernacle
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Mars Volta deals in extremes. The band’s sound sometimes swings from one extreme to the other, but more often it incorporates both extremes at once. Loud and soft, punk-rock and space-rock â€â€? listening to this band is like hearing Pink Floyd play metal, like hearing Rush collide with Radiohead.
The Mars Volta plays brutally hard music that’s also pretty, or maybe it’s the other way around. Lyrics are mostly in English, but sometimes in Spanish, which is how the Pixies used to do it, but the Pixies played abrupt pop in punk’s clothing and the Mars Volta dresses abrupt punk in the flowing robes of sprawling progressive rock.
The band’s 2005 record, “Frances The Mute,” is for the most part extremely good, one of the most ambitious I’ve heard all year. The band’s show Friday night at the Tabernacle was for the most part extremely bad, the most frustrating concert I’ve attended all year.
Over the course of more than two hours, the band somehow obscured almost everything that makes it great. On “Frances,” The Mars Volta synthesized such disparate sounds as squawky jazz and thrashing rock, using the piercing voice of singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala as a kind of laser-guided weapon, cutting through the chaos. In concert, the band sounded like a murky mess.
I’ve seen a lot of shows at the Tabernacle, and Friday night’s sound was the worst â€â€? it seemed to have the treble and bass maxed out, at the expense of midrange. Bixler-Zavala’s voice had little support. Multiple instruments (keyboards, percussion, flute, sax) were inaudible for long stretches of the show. A friend unfamiliar with the band joined me at the concert, and he left complaining that he couldn’t hear any detail, which is terrible, because the details are what make this band so amazing under the right circumstances.
We got a glimpse of the band’s greatness about halfway through the set during “L’Via “L’Viaquez,” the centerpiece of “Frances,” which is part angular rock song, part Afro-Cuban groove. The Mars Volta loves to lurch, and the effect can be unpleasantly jarring, but this song â€â€? live and on record â€â€? has improbably wonderful pacing that lures you in.
Most of Friday’s show did the opposite of lure. Songs seemed to go on forever, and the set hardly ever had a full stop â€â€? between tunes the band would keep the music going with little interludes. A charitable fan might say the musicians were constructing a sonic bridge between the song that just ended and the song that was to begin. A less charitable view would say they were just noodling â€â€? one interlude sounded like a cross between a whale song and a Van Halen riff.
If the songs themselves came off right, these inter-song meanderings could’ve been forgiven. But not on this night.
Permalink | | Categories: Pop Music
ASO teaching the classics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org.
School was in session Thursday in Symphony Hall, for better and worse.
At the end of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s concert, we were treated to Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” a dazzling instrument-by-instrument tour through the mighty ensemble. A pair of enthusiastic, poised student narrators — Jennifer Picard and Patrick Russum, both musicians in the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra — delivered the play by play. The ASO delivered passion and high spirits, the best showing of the night.
At the beginning, however, in music by Mozart, we received a different sort of instruction: a fraught etiquette lesson.
It was subtle but effective. Conductor Donald Runnicles was leading Mozart’s Symphony No. 29. The opening movement, agreeably zesty and tuneful, had come to a close. A few folks in the audience started to applaud, which is verboten nowadays but follows the practice of Mozart’s own time. Were these clappers neophytes to the concert hall? Were they scholar-activists on a mission to restore so-called “historically informed” audience practices? It was hard to tell.
Whoever they were, Runnicles shut them down with a raised left hand, a signal that he wasn’t finished. With silence restored, the symphony could continue.
Classical music and its practitioners are clearly in a period of upheaval. The music itself, on good nights, remains vital. But our culture is zooming away from the social conditions and lifestyle under which orchestras flourished. Attention-deficit American audiences are more fickle than ever.
Yet the musicians on stage cling to their familiar and, frankly, staid conventions of dress, repertoire, scheduling and, most peculiarly, enforced audience etiquette. They play; we sit there in worshipful silence and applaud at the designated time.
Does it have to be this way? Why stifle the audience?(Wagner’s “Parsifal” profits from a hyper-receptive, and thus stone silent, listening; Mozart would surely laugh at the argument that applause wrecks mental concentration.) One suspects that a little more musician-audience give-and-take would be a welcome advance.
Mozart’s Concerto in F for Three Pianos, just before intermission, featured Runnicles as conductor-pianist, joined by two relative youngsters, both from Atlanta: Robert Henry, a prize-winning pianist and doctoral candidate in Maryland, and Sarah Elizabeth Gibson, a talented pianist-composer studying in Indiana.
Although the reading seemed at times underrehearsed — with Runnicles’ hands busy on the black and whites, the orchestra gave ragged accompaniment — it was neat to see the three keyboards facing the audience in a long row and to watch the communication among pianists. In the slow middle movement, they elevated the concerto from elementary exercise to poignant statement.
Permalink | | Categories: Classical Music
