Symphony at the Roundhouse

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      Featuring the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Alain Trudel. A VSO and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival satellite coproduction. At the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre on Saturday, January 20

      Let’s put it this way: last Saturday’s Symphony at the Roundhouse concert was the sonic equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction. In general, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s new-music series, now entering its fourth season, has been an aesthetically successful and even mildly daring attempt to interest the orchestral audience in something other than pops concerts and the three Bs. But something must have happened to VSO resident composer (and series organizer) Jeffrey Ryan’s discerning senses. Why else would he have programmed such a stinker as Stephen Paulus’s Voices From the Gallery?

      Even the premise of this 11-movement work is a bore: compile an entry-level list of Great Works of Art, throw slides of each of them up on a screen, and then have earnest rhymester Joan Vail Thorne channel the thoughts of the various painters’ subjects. The piece seems aimed at American high-school students, but even they would recoil from its condescending and prescriptive tone; offering it to a culturally savvy Vancouver crowd was a major lapse in judgment.

      Where to begin? Well, among the featured works were The Birth of Venus, the Mona Lisa, and American Gothic. Cutting-edge stuff, hey? Reading Vail Thorne’s thoughts on Nude Descending a Staircase, narrator Andrea Blakey interpreted Marcel Duchamp’s shudderingly kinetic image as an intermittent stutter; for Pablo Picasso’s She-Goat, she adopted a faux French accent and a goatlike bleat. It was ba-a-a-a-d. Really ba-a-a-a-d.

      Paulus’s music was intricate, accomplished, and utterly lacking in any human flair.

      Wit, at least, was on display in Siegfried Interlude #1, which opened the performance. In it, Australian composer Matthew Hindson arranged a variety of Wagnerian themes for brass ensemble, replete with oompah tuba and a quote from Herbie Hancock’s boogaloo classic “Watermelon Man”. A better appetizer would be hard to imagine, but the momentum this genial work generated was dissipated by a lengthy shuffling of chairs and then by Rose Bolton’s Incidental Music of My Mind, a seamless but predictable depiction of a commuter’s day, complete with traffic-jam car horns and caffeine-fuelled office anxiety. Michelle Boudreau’s Entre Belacqua et Nell was a formal deconstruction of a few phrases from Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable; it, too, was well-made in an academic way. Notably, it called on soloist Vern Griffiths to declaim the fractured text while manipulating a variety of clattering noisemakers—and, unsurprisingly, the VSO’s principal percussionist acquitted himself well. But once Voices From the Gallery began, the evening was lost.

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