Skip to content

Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra with Schoenberg and Competition Premieres

Music stands and couches ornamented the floor of the spacious Los Angeles Theater Center on Saturday night. The breaking-down of a formal performance space allowed the audience to mill around, taking in the scattered spoiler of instruments warming up while gazing on the building’s marble boundaries. A bar nestled into the far corner helped encourage curious roaming behind a vague suggestion of stage, and the casually awkward pre-concert discussion conveyed a sense of heartfelt “we’re glad you’re here”-ness.  Taken together, the whole atmosphere had a communal spirit—one that begins with Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra‘s self-branding as a conductor-less chamber orchestra and extends into their significant educational and artistic outreach.

Many things felt right. Among them, the location and late start time gave a feeling of entering a musical petting zoo buried on South Spring street. Both before and after the concert I noticed dozens of passer-byes stopping, poking their head in, trying to understand what was happening behind the shiny glass doors. The fact that inside was a musical gathering of palpable informality was made even cooler by the idea one might have walked right by it were their head buried in their phone. But our heads were up, for the moment, and our reward was a peek under the lid of this strange buried treasure in the neon-blue depths of downtown.

In fact, many of the details of the evening were so thoughtful: The audio mix in the first half, the layout of the ensemble and equipment, the programs (save a few typos) and promotional materials were all very good. The Sandbox Percussion Quartet were excellent, both in Viet Cuong’s Re(new)al with Kaleidoscope, and as solo quartet on Aart Strootman’s Requiem Apoidea. That first half, in particular, had a sense of musical impetus and vision stemming from the quartet—simultaneously mindful and theatrical. Besides their ecological commonalities, Strootman’s work was reflective and ritualistic where Cuong’s employed a linear, at times post-minimalist, language. In both cases, the music, performance, and environment were integrated to feel fresh, young, decidedly anti-stuffy.

The second half, for me, demonstrated one of the challenges inherent to any an ensemble sourcing artistic vision from the whole ensemble rather than a single musical director: incoherence. It was clear that there were talented musicians on stage who had spent time rehearsing together, but for both Alyssa Weinberg’s Title TBD and Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No.1, the music would have benefited from a unifying interpretation, a unifying set of ears to balance, a unifying set of emotions to feel and respond to the room. The vision and physicality conveyed by Sandbox Percussion on the first half led the ensemble into realizing musical ideas with a sense of coherence and inevitability. That sense was noticeably missing from these final two works—works which were, more than most, reliant on that very nuance. How to develop clarity and detail as a group is tricky for any ensemble, especially one that emphasizes such a democratic artistic process. The takeaway from my first experience with Kaleidoscope? It will not be my last: it was entertaining and unpretentious and fresh. Add to that their philosophy and ambitious programming for this season, I can say for sure I’ll be there rooting for them.