Event fuses Russian classical music with diverse art forms
By Giselle Maund
Jan. 30, 2007 9:00 p.m.
What’s fresher than the latest club banger from Akon or
Jay-Z?
Think back to Russia around World War I, when composers Sergei
Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky became greats because of their
innovative contributions to classical music at such a pivotal time
in history.
Prokofiev’s “Trapeze” and Stravinsky’s
“The Soldier’s Tale” will be performed Thursday
at 6 p.m. during “A Night of Russian Chamber Music,”
part of the Fowler Out Loud series in the Lenart Auditorium at the
Fowler Museum.
Chelsea Howell, a doctorate student in the UCLA Department of
Music and the event’s artistic director, had the idea to
complement these two musical pieces with as many other art forms as
she could.
Musicians, choreographers, dancers, actors and UCLA faculty have
blended their talents to turn this would-be concert into a more
diverse artistic experience.
“The more different forms of art that you use together,
the more interesting a performance is,” Howell said.
“You can hear in the music that it lends itself to something
visual, so it appealed to me to do something that I thought would
be accurate to the music and the composer and also entertaining to
watch.”
The instruments used in these two pieces mirror the
event’s spirit of artistic fusion. The oboe, clarinet,
violin, viola and string bass included in “Trapeze” are
seldom combined in classical chamber music.
Making the piece even more rare, the quintet version of
“Trapeze” was only fully pieced together in 2003, when
a musicologist found its two missing movements.
The second movement was composed later and the finale existed as
part of “The Prodigal Son.”
The piece has only been performed with ballet a few times since
its recovery, making tomorrow’s performance a must-see
opportunity.
“(“˜Trapeze’) is very dissonant, but it’s
also very beautiful,” Howell said. “It was really fun
for me to see the dancers choreograph something to go with it.
It’s interesting to see what people will do when they hear a
piece of music, and how they convey that through another art
form.”
Similarly, Stravinsky’s piece, “The Soldier’s
Tale,” was written for a smaller number of musicians rather
than an entire orchestra, partly because so many musicians were
gone when it was written, off fighting in World War I.
“He had to use what he could,” said Dan Cummings, a
doctor of musical arts student and the conductor for the piece.
“Stravinsky, who was famous for lush and opulent Russian
ballets written for very large orchestras, was cut off from his
resources. He needed to make money, but he needed a smaller group.
This piece spawned a lot of others written for small and odd
chamber orchestras.”
Tomorrow night, Cummings will conduct musicians playing the
trumpet, trombone, clarinet, violin, bassoon, string bass and
percussion in “The Soldier’s Tale,” a piece known
for its unusual rhythms.
With such a small number of musicians, a conductor is not often
needed, but “The Soldier’s Tale” is an exception
to that norm.
Simeon Den, the choreographer of the event and a fourth-year
world arts and cultures student, also embraced the challenges of
working with such a “rhythmic tour de force,” as
Cummings calls it. Along with creating choreography to match the
music, Den found ways to animate the musical story using modern
visuals.
“It is very complicated for dance because the time
signatures change,” Den said. “The challenge also was
making the piece appealing to people who are not familiar with it
by adding the visual aspects of the piece. The soldier is in
modern-day wear, for example. It’s not Disney-fied, but
it’s updated so that people of this age can relate more to
it.”
Just as Prokofiev and Stravinsky worked to make their music
accessible and important to their era, those involved in
Thursday’s production also are adapting to new obstacles
facing the fine arts.
“It’s getting harder and harder to sell an evening
of chamber music unless you get really creative about it,”
said Cummings.
“A lot of times, it involves collaboration. Seeing all
these talented and creative people in different fields come
together to make this is an amazing thing. You really can’t
see anything like this anywhere else.”
