'"The Blue Rider" in Performance' brings new media to Miller

Miller Theatre opened its 2009-2010 season with an inventive fusion of music, dance, and visual art. Miller has a new leader at its helm, Melissa Smey, who replaced the theater’s director of 11 years, George Steel. If there were any doubts about whether Smey can sustain her predecessor’s reputation for adventurous programming, this event should have put them to rest. 

The night was billed as “‘The Blue Rider’ in Performance,” which featured music for solo piano and piano with voice by Schoenberg, Webern, and other contemporaries, and closed with a Schoenberg work for string quartet and voice. To accompany the music, abstract visualizations emerged on a cave-like backdrop behind the musicians. The visualizations developed with the music, often starting as a mere line or shape which could extend, turn, disappear, or discolor as the music progressed. 

The point of so many artistic elements occurring simultaneously was perplexing. The music by Schoenberg, with its departure from such basic rules as melody and tonal harmony, had inspired the visual artist Vasily Kandinsky to a similar breaking point in his own work, as he turned from the outer world of concrete things to an inner world of pure abstraction.

The inspiration he found in music convinced Kandinsky of a great spiritual unity between art forms, and he subsequently founded “The Blue Rider” (the namesake of the night’s performance) as a group for collaboration between different kinds of artists.

Often these multimedia projects can get gimmicky. Putting different art forms together easily makes for distraction and potentially detracts from each art form’s independence. The success of the performance rested on whether each art form could express itself enough to be genuinely appreciated or whether the fusion betrayed inadequacy in the parts, like rum that needs a chaser.

The performance at Miller passed this test because the music, painting, dance, and literature all had their own legitimate voices on the stage. This was evident in the way the projections grew as the music progressed. The artist seemed to be listening to the music and responding in his own way—it was not as if Miller Theatre deliberately supplemented the music with art to make it easier for the audience.

Unlike a traditional recital, with applause and bows between numbers, the music was presented as one continuous production divided only by an intermission. By forgoing applause and bows after every piece, the programmers did a huge favor to the music, which, in contrast to the perfunctory air of piece-by-piece recitals, offered a total immersion into the emotional world of the performers and artists. The pianist Sarah Rothenberg and soprano Susan Narucki received plenty of well earned praise at the end of the first act. At the end of the second, the Brentano String Quartet did justice to the intimacy of the music in their demeanor on stage.