From the Canyons to the What?

On Sunday Corey and I attended a performance of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra sponsored by the University Musical Society. The program was a single piece: Olivier Messiaen's "From the Canyons to the Stars..."

First, a little background: Messiaen (French, 1098-1992) wrote this piece as the result of a comission to commemorate the 200th anniversary of American independence. He wasn't crazy about cities, so the piece is mostly inspired by the red-rock formations in Utah. He was also deeply spiritual which is said to be reflected in his work.

Corey loves this piece and we were really excited to attend a live performance by a professional orchestra. The Hamburg Symphony had specially commissioned a film to go along with their performance. Great, right? Artistic collaboration, a visual representation of this ethereal piece...I'm still riding a high from Einstein on the Beach, so this multimedia experience should be more brain-candy, right?

The performance was great. The piece is amazing and the soloists were incredible. The piece heavily features solo piano, almost to the point of being a concerto, and Francesco Tristano played with such sensitivity, and flowed perfectly from a part of the orchestra to becoming the orchestra as the movements changed. I wish I had more to say about the music, but the film was so GD distracting that I couldn't fully concentrate on it.

Now, I really did try to give the film a chance, I really did want to like it; but in the end, the emperor had no clothes. It's difficult to describe in words, but at the risk of sounding pedestrian, it was boring and had nothing to do with the music. It contained just about every "art film" cliche I (in my limited knowledge) can think of: midgets, old guys, shots of birds in a landfill, people in animal masks, footage of people eating followed by footage of the empty table, a car fire, the same group of people walking through various fields, there were even Blair Witch-style stick figures in a forest with mounted cow skulls.

So during the concert I was bored. (The way my brain is wired, it's difficult for me to tune out the visual in favor of sounds, and if I shut my eyes, I will start to doze off.) It was not until after, when I had a chance to read the program notes, that I became downright pissed.

(The program notes I am about to quote were written by Daniel Kuhnel. The film itself was by Daniel Landau.)

"Clearly Messiean's 100-minute composition is strong enough to be heard purely as a piece of music. However, the intellectual complexity of the work (a part of its beauty) is not fully apparent through listening alone."

Excuse me? This is what I hear: this piece is good, but it's SO much better with this thing we added. One couldn't possibly understand this piece without being visually spoon-fed. (Which might be okay, if the content of the film had ANYTHING to do with the content of this heavily programmatic piece.) It's not as if people can't research the composer and the piece and do a little reading before the show.

"The 12 movements of the music serve as a key to Landau's interpretation of Messiaen's work. The film is a visual narrative in which a metaphoric voyage of discovery unfolds..."

If someone can explain to me the logic behind a movement called "The orioles" being represented by the floating corpse of a pregnant woman, I will apologize for this whole post.

"The opening scenes were filmed at the Dead Sea...where the main characters embark on a journey of survival taking the audience from the breath-taking mountain landscapes of the Judean desert to heavily industrialized modern Europe."

Interesting choices to represent a piece written about specific national parks in America which are mentioned by name in the titles of the FREAKING movements.

That said, I might not hate the film if I saw it independently of the piece. It's like how I say that good music does what it sets out to do, everything else is just a matter of taste. The same can be said of any art form. I honestly believe that this film fails to be a adequate visual representation of Messiaen's work. I felt like I was witnessing two completely different works of art happening simultaneously, which, after seeing Einstein (artistic collaboration at its very best) was a HUGE let-down.