What happens when renegades clash? That’s assuming Daniel Landau, creator of the video triptych paired with Messaien’s From the Canyon to the Stars at Sunday’s performance by the Hamburg Symphony, is a renegade. If you define the term as an “outlaw” or “rebel,” one who rejects allegiance, I suppose he might count. But if you take the broader definition UMS seems to be striving for in this 10-week series—change-agent, visionary, artist-to-be-reckoned-with—I think not.
I have yet to meet an audience member who wasn’t infuriated by the concert. As we were pulling on our coats at the end of the performance, the older man who’d been sitting next to me muttered, “That’s one DVD I’m not going to rush out and buy.”
The contrast with last week’s Einstein could scarcely have been more pronounced: instead of losing myself in the exhilarations of abstraction, I battled distraction, looked down at my lap, closed my eyes, anything to shut out Landau’s incomprehensible take on Messiaen’s mystical music. (Maybe if I’d seen the video as a stand-alone piece I’d have been more forgiving. Maybe. Was the Hamburg Symphony trying to shove social action down our throats, by any means? What did the musicians think of the inanities parading across the video screens above them?) With Einstein I was dimly aware of time passing but blissfully unaware of how quickly or slowly it was moving. Here I was excruciatingly cognizant. This is no slur against Messiaen, whose music, difficult and jarring though it was/is, was also deeply inviting. I wanted to give in to its strange and surprising effects, its tantalizing evocations of wind and birds and canyons and water, its timelessness. But Landau’s insistently narrative video kept getting in the way. I’d never quite realized before how powerfully narrative constrains our experience of time. Where Messiaen—and the stellar performers from Hamburg—seemed to want to blast open time and space, Landau kept yanking us back into his tawdry little story. The last thing I wanted was chronology, the clock ticking.
Impossible, at Sunday’s performance, to enter Messiaen’s world. I wanted to imagine his birds, wanted to dig below my own musical prejudices and preferences, gnaw through the surface difficulty of his score and hear the earth, which is anything but consonant. Landau put a stop to that. So we had a butting of renegades: the video maverick clanging heads with the symphonic change-agent, and the result was cacophany.

Last night’s performance reminded me of being a kid and hearing my parents talk, knowing it was about something important, but not able to quite understand what or why. Everything in the 4+ hours was clearly deliberate–all the choreography, stage effects, everything. Usually when we see a large group of people being very deliberate about what they do, it means something important, but, last night, what did it all mean? It took a while to get to sleep last night, as it was all still in my head; I think my brain was trying to sort through everything I had seen and make sense of it. Even though it seemed like so many things were abstract, and hard to define, I felt like I was able to connect with the performance, partially since I knew the why there were so many trains and clocks (if you don’t, go read Einstein’s book on his theory of special relativity), and also because I could see, in this opera without a plot, an overall exploration into different ways we perceive time, you know, how sometimes it seems like your watch stops and time pauses in space, and other times it merely seems to slow down, and the rest of the time we don’t really notice it at all. It seemed to me that the opera was largely about exploration into space and time. I still want to ask “what does it all mean?” but maybe that’s not the right question. If it was meant to be a story, it would have had a plot. It didn’t. It was more like a poem, a poem that’s not about rhyme and meter but about the sound of the words, only not just about the sound of the words, but the effect of choreography and colors of music. This means that some people will likely find it inaccessible, but for me, it was understandable enough to appreciate, and I wish I had a ticket to go see it again tonight. Thank you UMS for helping to bring “Einstein on the Beach” to Ann Arbor.

I’m writing this from Dallas, TX, where I am eagerly and avidly following your posted comments re: the Einstein previews this weekend. I’ve been a Wilson-Glass devotee for 30 years and am currently trying to help find a way to bring Einstein here to Dallas, as I’m sure that the artistic underground and performing arts culturati here are ready for it and would eat it up with a spoon.

Please describe more about how the abstraction of the piece affected you. Did you have to go through an initial period of boredom or confusion before you experienced any sort of transcendent epiphany while experiencing the piece and if so, how long did any boredom or confusion last? Did you feel that there were too many longeurs in the piece where your interest level was too difficult to sustain, or no? Did you experience any kind of transcendent epiphany at all? Did you think that the whole thing was overblown, overhyped, a waste of money-time, etc.?

Personally, I’m totally psyched by the positive comments thus far, so Let ‘Em Fly, Comrades. Inquiring Minds In Dallas Want To Know. And Thank You Very, Very Much.