Concert Review of Bobby Previte's The Separation (Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY)
An arresting sonic maelstrom
By Garaud MacTaggart - NEWS CONTRIBUTING REVIEWER - © The Buffalo
News Inc.
February 8, 2007
It is too early to say if "The Separation," the collaboration of Bobby Previte and Andrea Kleine (billed as a "Song Cycle On Church and State"), which was performed Wednesday evening in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Asbury Hall in The Church, is something destined to go down in arts history as a milestone, but there certainly are some interesting, nay, arresting, moments.
This is due, in part, because so many different things are going on at more or less the same time. Layered over a heavily amplified mashup of Guillaume Dufay's 15th century score for the "Missa Sancti Jacobi," sections of music inspired by Olivier Messiaen's 20th century organ suite "La Nativite du Seigneur" and rock guitar licks that sound like hybrids of Sonic Youth and the Deftones, is a text dealing, on the surface, with the life history of a laboratory sheep (aka 6LL3).
Christine Holt is the narrator for this production, slipping into sheep mode and dog mode as the script warrants and doing a surprisingly unhackneyed job of it. Holt's movements about the stage are controlled but not quite dancelike; she traipses behind the choir, unveiling various props and crawling on all fours in a very sheeplike manner, sometimes emoting, other times just moving from one place to another, seeking to hit the mark for her next bit of speechifying.
The Rose Ensemble is a splendid choir whose basic repertoire leans toward the Baroque and the Renaissance eras and their take on the splintered version of the Dufay masterpiece they were charged with presenting was most exemplary.
Their sonic interaction with Previte's explosive drumming, Reed Mathis' powerful (albeit suitably distorted) guitar playing and Marco Benevento's keyboard turns was almost overwhelmed at times but, on the whole, managed to maintain their place in the aural maelstrom because of the microphones attached to their music stands.