LA Phil all-Steve Reich concert

Minimalism Jukebox
Steve Reich

The all Steve Reich concert at Disney Hall featured Synergy Vocals singing Tehillim with members of the LA Phil on strings, winds, percussion. Who are Synergy Vocals I wondered? They have a web site and hail from the UK from what I can tell. From the looks of it, they have a pretty heady endorsement from Steve Reich too. So I was all the more surprised when I heard their unstable, sometimes sloppy, and sloooow rendition of Tehillim with the LA Phil. More on that later.
I love “Tehillim”. It is a masterpiece. There just doesn’t seem to be one false step in it. I feel the same about his “Sextet” and “Music for 18 Musicians”. “Tehillim” is very hard to perform, particularly for the singers and I would venture to say, the maraca player. And it’s worth every ounce of effort. I have conducted a performance of it myself a few years back. Confession: in every rehearsal and even in the performance, I would zone out at some place in the score – never the same place twice – because of its sheer beauty. Of course when it happened a sudden thought would jolt me out of it: “danger, where am I?” Now I don’t mean to sound cavalier about this because it is a serious matter when it happens, particularly when you have performers watching you with that look in their eye that says “you’d better cue me or …” – and especially if this performer is one of the sopranos who happens to be your wife (yes, this did happen!). Fortunately during the performance, it didn’t derail because my friend for life who was playing clarinet came in when he was supposed to and all was set right! Thank you forever, J.
No amount of score preparation and practice could prepare me for the fact that this would happen at least once in every performance or reading but never predictably in the same place. Since then, I have heard the piece performed a couple of times and have spoken to the conductors. They related the same story to me – that they too had zoned out. So we commiserated.
But this conductor, Stefan Asbury – also hailing from the UK - who led the Reich concert had no such propensity for zoning out. He was impressive though he gave a rather slow and relaxed rendition of the score, perhaps too sluggish in the end. Still, he embodied the score, giving cues and shaping phrases while keeping the continuously shifting metrical patterns clear. I know – this is the job of any good conductor, but this piece presents special challenges. There simply isn’t any place in the score where your concentration can let up for a nanosecond. And things move quickly most of the time though in Asbury’s performance things moved much less urgently.
The Synergy Vocals singers were surprisingly unstable at the outset. There were a few tuning issues here and also elsewhere in the performance. They weren’t at all helped, in fact terribly harmed, by the abysmal sound reinforcement. Who in the world does the sound at Disney Hall? They should seriously consider getting another sound engineer in there or at least hiring a consultant to work with the sound engineer. The score calls for amplification, but the balances were terrible. The second soprano who opens the piece was way over-amplified while the first soprano was barely audible. In fact at the opening of the piece it seemed like the sound engineer was still dialing in folks and didn’t have a clue as to balances. It didn’t sound like the strings and winds were amplified at all. So not only were the balances terrible among the vocal quartet, they were non-existent among the vocalists and instrumentalists. And I spoke with a friend after the concert who sat behind the orchestra and he said the same thing about the balances. Apparently it wasn’t a function of where I was sitting in the hall – the balcony in the center.
The problem is that the terrible sound engineering made the piece very difficult to discern. You could barely hear the strings and winds when they played alone. And the quality of the singing was not at a musical level one would expect of the LA Philharmonic with the possible exception of the duet between soprano 2 and 4 in Part III. At the climax in Part IV the high soprano was out of gas and catastrophically missed her highest note in the piece. This was a disappointing performance compounded by the really poor sound design work.
At the beginning, before the concert, the general manager of the LA Phil came out on stage and told us that the concert was being recorded directly for Apple iTunes store downloading – the first collaboration of its kind between any orchestra and Apple. This is cool. The audience was very cooperative, holding its applause and listening raptly. There wasn’t the kind of jump out of your skin enthusiasm as there had been for the Riley “In C” performance a few days earlier, probably because we were told to behave, but it was a respectful and supportive crowd. The problem is - who would want to download this performance with the disabling sound problems? On second thought, I’d be curious about that download. Maybe the LA Phil post-produced and pitch corrected and balanced it. There’s no way I could imagine the LA Phil would want to release this performance for the iTunes store without some serious post-production work.
Update – I went to the Apple iTunes store and there it is. You can link to it from the la phil website too.
I listened to a few of the excerpts from “Tehillim” and this is a very different mix than I heard live. But the tuning issues and sluggishness are still there. I wouldn’t recommend it.