HYSTERIA and 1996
Two weekends ago, I attended a pair of concerts in Los Angeles – 1996 at The Wallis, and HYSTERIA at the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles.
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1996 is a project undertaken by the Bang on a Can All Stars to present the entirety of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 1996 album. The group’s clarinetist Ken Thomson adapted and arranged the album’s original piano trio to the All Stars’ sextet of piano, percussion, clarinet, bass, cello, and electric guitar. The arrangements remain quite faithful to Sakamoto’s originals, save for the notable addition of drumset, which were added to a number of pieces. David Cossin’s playing is sensitive and Ken’s arrangements are thoughtful, and so the drums were applied tastefully enough to offer a good mix of novelty and familiarity; honestly, I thought I would have a problem with the drums but was surprised at how much I liked how it drove certain tracks. It turned “Tribute to NJP” into something math-y and prog-y – or perhaps it’d be more accurate to say that Ken’s arrangement brought out the latent math / prog he heard inside the piece. He remarked, in between pieces, that he approached some of these arrangements by inquiring what Sakamoto may have been listening to and influenced by; if something felt vaguely Steve Reich, he leaned in to it and incorporated process / phasing techniques into the arrangement .The approach of “leaning” into these elements was the right one; it allowed the band to offer new interpretations of Sakamoto’s most well-known melodies, embracing the All Stars’ instrumental proximity to a rock band, rather than trying to keep it classical.
However; I can’t help but wonder about the choice for the band to be 100% amplified – it’s such an integral part of their sound that the sound engineer Andrew Cotton is featured as prominently as the instrumentalists on their website, and the group’s bio begins by calling itself a “six-member amplified ensemble.” I read (or heard?) somewhere that the choice to simply amplify everything went as far back as Bang on Can’s founding, as foundational to the group as their name. But when I think about the problems I had with the performance (can’t hear the vibraphone in loud tutti sections, too much reverb on cello, a particularly resonant bass frequency), many of them seem to relate to the instruments being amplified. I can’t help but wonder if these imbalances happen due to an over-reliance on amplification, though to be fair, if the mission was solely to bring the acoustic instruments’ levels up to match the guitar (and drums), they succeeded; somehow neither guitar nor drums were ever too loud. Maybe they had an off-day, maybe I’m just wrong, but I left thinking about this issue more than I would have liked to.
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I’ll get it out the way, HYSTERIA also had conspicuous audio issues; one microphone turning on and off intermittently, and voices turned up way too loud in certain sections. I think the issue has more to do with trying to present an opera (here, an oratorio) for a small instrumental ensemble and voices in a massive church; you need enough sound to reach the seats in the back, but in that space it’s incredibly easy to overwhelm listeners with amplified sound swimming in the natural reverb.
That’s all the bad – there’s plenty of good to save it. The music is compelling and varied; this piece has been in progress for at least five years, and has had at least two workshop / work-in-progress presentations, and as such I can only imagine that new additions to the work vary as much as Molly changes and grows as a composer.
From what I can tell, the “new stuff” is the second section – an allusion to ancient mythology to be allegorized to the more contemporary first section, reminding me of Kate Soper’s Romance of the Rose (from three years ago at the Long Beach Opera, sharing at least one cast member in Laurel Irene). It’s a good way to universalize the experiences of the subjects in the story; the goddesses themselves experience discrimination at the hands of male gods – how could it surprise us that we do the same?
I’m personally not a fan of workshop performances; though I’m aware that the scale of theatrical productions make it so that unstaged / unfinished performances happen as necessary stepping stones towards a full staging, I can never shake the feeling that I saw something “unfinished” and therefore rhetorically excused from criticism (who knows what’ll get “fixed” later?). This performance seemed to end before presenting its unifying idea, the thematic linchpin holding the reason why these several stories are presented in the same work. From Molly’s website: “HYSTERIA is an evening-length chamber opera-in-progress tackling the evolution of gender and mental health narratives through the stories of five real, fictional, and mythological heroines.” I’m hopeful for when the full production actually happens!