Photo Credit: Troy Freund
We can almost always expect Present Music to bring on the unexpected, as was the case last Thursday evening at the Jan Serr Studio. Various trends showed up in a concert called “The Avant-Garden of Love;” not exactly a typical Valentine’s Day-themed program.
A commission was premiered with Frank Pahl’s imaginative score to the expressionistic 1927 silent film, The Love of Zero, directed by Robert Florey. The composer and three other musicians played an assortment of instruments, including baritone saxophone, trombone, guitar and toys of various kinds. It’s a sweetly absurd film about a trombone-playing, Harlequin-like character, Zero, his love for Beatrix and ultimate heartbreak. Pahl’s fascinating and delicate score, inventively orchestrated, captures joy and melancholy, with a haunting theme that is heard as a recorded whistle then comes around again on various instruments.
Jacob TV (aka Jacob fer Veidhuis) created his own magical surrealism in the multi-media The Garden of Love, which sets text from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Co-artistic director David Bloom elegantly conducted the program, which included Dobrinka Tabakova’s Such Different Paths, beautifully played by the string ensemble.
Yehuda Yannay, dressed in outlandish garb, brought to vivid life Gadji Beri Bimba, a nonsense word poem by Hugo Ball, first performed in 1916 as a parody of the German kaiser. An almost straight-faced Bloom was delightfully busy as a solo performer with a filled bathtub, goose call, five radios and other objects in John Cage’s “happening” piece, Water Walk, first presented on primetime television in 1960.
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Most of the second half of the concert was devoted to the attractive, arty jazz of Swedish composer and singer Sophie Dunér. Her voice spanned well more than two octaves as she freely spun out Something to Say, Rain in Spain, Red Sailor Girl and The Express Train. I loved her edgy scat singing in Hey Doctor, in which a frenzied woman asks the physician for a remedy of love. It was fitting that the concert ended with a lovely jazz ballad, with Dunér and the ensemble performing Ornette Coleman’s What Reason Could I Give? in a stylish arrangement by Eric Segnitz.
