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SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT REVIEW
Last Songs for the King:
Peter Tantsits (tenor), International Contemporary Ensemble, Le Poisson Rouge, New York City, 2.4.2009
By Bruce Hodges
MusicWeb International original
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April 2, 2009
Alvin Lucier: Bird and Berson Dyning (1975)
Jean-Philippe Rameau: "Le rappel des oiseaux" from Pièces
de clavecin (1724)
Peter Maxwell Davies: Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969)
Directed by Lydia Steier
International Contemporary Ensemble
Peter Tantsits, Tenor
Claire Chase, Flute
Joshua Rubin, Clarinet
David Bowlin, Violin
Kivie Cahn-Lipman, Cello
Phyllis Chen, Piano
David Schotzko, Percussion
Aaron Mason, Lighting Design
Robert Gonyo, Production Manager
Classical music and video often make uneasy colleagues. Often when I see visual elements added to concerts my first impulse is to cringe. But this outing by the International Contemporary Ensemble (a.k.a. ICE) at (Le) Poisson Rouge was unusually gratifying — one of the best uses of video in this context I've encountered. Granted, the piece itself, Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King, rewards theatrical invention with a huge payback.
Written in 1969, Davies's score chronicles the mental demise of King George III and his descent into outright madness. A sextet plays a dreamlike accompaniment while the title character loses all inhibitions (or should). Director Lydia Steier's brilliant conceit is to place Davies's singer on film, here in an Oscar-worthy performance by Peter Tantsits. As the lights dimmed and the musicians began (with percussion outbursts by David Schotzko), Tantsits's face appeared onscreen, eerily captured by a camera in grainy black-and-white, like a lab specimen undergoing some kind of unnamed experiment. Or perhaps he's in some hellish government office renewing a driver's license. Whatever the case, he's never unaware that he is onscreen; the Mad King appreciates the value of publicity, and we are uneasy voyeurs.
As the musicians forge ahead, Tantsits sang in falsetto, scowled, tittered, opened his mouth rudely wide, offered anemic groans, and painted his face liquid white. At least, before he took a cloth and removed the make-up, leaving small bits of it to register, perhaps as remnants of an obsessive-compulsive streak. I kept thinking of the extreme close-ups in Dreyer's 1928 film, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc.
At the climax, Tantsits emerged from behind the screen, grabbed the violin from an astonished David Bowlin and began slowly tearing it apart, snapping the wood and strings, bending the frame so that it cracked in half, ultimately destroying it. When carefully conceived this sequence can draw gasps from the audience, and it did so here. (And then Tantsits turned to focus on the cellist, Kivie Cahn-Lipman, whose look of nervous anxiety was priceless.) Tantsits then returned to his perch behind the screen to complete the piece, like a caged animal being returned to his cell. Flutist Claire Chase and Joshua Rubin on clarinet completed the expert, relentlessly besieged, ensemble.
To set the mood, as people entered the subterranean space they encountered Alvin Lucier's Bird and Berson Dyning, a mix of birdcalls and high-frequency feedback that created an unearthly ambience. And the Davies was prefaced by pianist Phyllis Chen in Rameau's "Le rappel des oiseaux" from Pièces de clavecin, which seemed, in this context, more mock-reverential: a sarcastic anthem to a king whose downward-spiraling persona needed some serious propping up.
Copyright © 2009 MusicWeb International
