04 November 2011
Review: Lonely Motel, Music from Slide
by Michael Quinn
original link
One of the highlights of the 2009 Ojai Music Festival was the premiere of Slide, a music theater piece composed by Steven Mackey to a libretto by Rinde Eckert, and performed by the Chicago-based new music sextet, eighth blackbird. Following performances elsewhere in the United States, the work was re-fashioned into a concert version and taken into the recording studio in March last year by the ensemble’s enterprising hometown label, Cedille Records. Lonely Motel: Music from Slide is the pulsing, powerful, prickly, provocative and often surprisingly poignant result.
Despite being stripped of its visual element (although you can get a flavor of proceedings here and here), on disc the music retains the disconcertingly visceral quality of the original stage work. Intense and claustrophobic, it drills down into the reactions of Renard, a research psychologist – sung with compelling and haunting ardor by Eckert – to expose emotional fault lines that are as fragile as they are they forceful.
As he watches a series of photographic slides from an experiment in visual perception and association, the physician struggles to heal his own, still-fresh wounds from being jilted on his wedding day, as one painful memory piles into another. In its coruscating concision, Lonely Motel conjures up the dyspeptic discontent that only ruined romance can induce with slicing, stabbing Berg-like textures that cut to the bone.
For Steven Mackey, who also serves as narrator, the work is “about the isolation created by the attachments we develop to our own fuzzy, personal views of reality.” Which may well make it one of the few contemporary pieces of music to engage so perceptively with the contrariness of an image-saturated (and seduced) America in the 21st century, and to lock antlers with the conundrum with unblinking directness of intent and execution.
The evocative (and punishingly painful) title track, which concludes the work on disc, is a concentrated cri de Coeur, pertinently calling to mind the brittle plaintiveness to be found in an English musical tradition that stretches from John Dowland to Benjamin Britten. The allusion shouldn’t surprise, given Mackey’s description of his multi-faceted score as “a dish by and for musical omnivores” in his brief liner note.
The music, he says, is “seasoned with homages” that have been “diced quite finely (and there is no quotation)”. Such digested references provide a discretely sophisticated and, in the true sense of the word, fascinating underpinning for music skilfully blends acoustic and electric instruments together with ambient sound effects. Mackey admits to Dowland, Mozart, Stravinsky, Piazzola and The Beatles, but repeated listening seems likely to reveal others.
In truth, it’s not an easy listen, the addition of the libretto in the booklet helping to corkscrew the attention into an aching, atomized involvement that borders on the disturbingly voyeuristic at times. But it is hugely rewarding on every count. The dramatic impact of the piece itself aside, it seems barely possible that any future performances could be as precise and puissant as to be heard here.
Eckert, a performer new to me, reveals himself to be a natural and nuanced stage animal, with an emotional presence that distills itself to discernible effect on disc. eighth blackbird, for whom the piece was written, play with unfailing engagement, negotiating Mackey’s abrupt, hairline shifts in mood and momentum with all the aplomb of high-wire acrobats. Unrelenting and emphatic though the music might sound at times, there’s never a glimmer of overstatement.
Plaudits, too, to producer David Frost and his team of engineers, who perfectly capture the peristaltic theatrically of both the piece and the performances.
