{"id":14222,"date":"2013-08-01T23:50:37","date_gmt":"2013-08-02T04:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=14222"},"modified":"2013-08-02T09:35:57","modified_gmt":"2013-08-02T14:35:57","slug":"concert-review-minimalist-dream-house-project-forgets-that-less-is-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2013\/08\/01\/concert-review-minimalist-dream-house-project-forgets-that-less-is-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Concert review: Minimalist Dream House Project forgets that less is more"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
The musicians of the Minimalist Dream House Project on the Koerner Hall stage Thursday night (John Terauds phone photo).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Although Toronto Summer Music Festival artistic director Douglas McNabney underlined how less is more when it comes to minimalism, the Lab\u00e8que sisters and their Minimalist Dream House Project at Koerner Hall on Thursday night were not just examples of more being more, but of too much being too much.<\/p>\n

That’s not to say there wasn’t some extraordinary musicmaking on stage. But any concert of Western music that demands four hours of our time, dropping us into the street at a quarter to midnight, had better make a pretty strong case for itself.<\/p>\n

And this is where the Minimalist Dream House Project fell short.<\/p>\n

Billed as a celebration of minimalism as it flourished amid New York and Los Angeles avant-gardists in the early 1960s, the project is a full-term survey course on the aesthetic and evolution of minimalist music compressed into four hours, minus the lecture notes.<\/p>\n

Ostensibly headed up by Katia and Marielle Lab\u00e8que, the world’s veteran piano-duo team, the Minimalist Dream House Project is clearly more Katia’s undertaking, as Marielle disappeared later in the evening and, along with nearly two-thirds of Thursday’s audience, didn’t show up for the final curtain call.<\/p>\n

The pianist(s) were joined by guitarist and singer David Chalmin, electric bass player Alexandre Maillard, keyboard player Nicola Tescari and percussionist Rapha\u00ebl S\u00e9guinier for much of the concert, which continually underlined the kinship between minimalism and 1980s guitar pop and some electronica.<\/p>\n

The elephant in Koerner Hall — and on every other stage where any artist says they are presenting minimalist music — is that there is no such thing.<\/p>\n

Minimalism has become a shorthand for a variety of pattern-based compositional styles that make uneasy bedfellows in a single programme.<\/p>\n

As if to illustrate the point, the evening started with a magical excerpt from an 1891 score of incidental music for a play, Le Fils des \u00e9toiles<\/em> (The Son of the Stars), by Erik Satie, who wouldn’t have recognized minimalism if Piet Mondrian had painted it on his bathroom mirror.<\/p>\n

But it was a sort of pattern music. The Lab\u00e8que sisters, later joined by the band, gave us four more examples — by John Cage, Arvo P\u00e4rt, William Duckworth and Philip Glass — each very different yet filled with the sort of careful layering of repetition and variation that gives this type of music impetus as well as interest.<\/p>\n

This took us to the end of the first hour. It would have made for a short but extremely satisfying concert, both intimate and revelatory, showing off the subtle and manifold talents of Katia’s brain and artistic trust.<\/p>\n

That said, a 30-minute performance of Terry Riley’s seminal work, In C<\/em>, was an excellent way to open Part II, but then the pop slant took over, the music got too loud and, in what was the real attention killer, too repetitive, as each song began quietly, working its way up to a grand, orgasmic eruption before coming to a shuddering halt.<\/p>\n

I stepped out into the lobby to catch my breath, following the progress of the concert from the comfortable remove of video screen and piped-in sound.<\/p>\n

The audience members who stayed for Part III were rewarded by the final reappearance of Marielle Lab\u00e8que in a radiant solo performance of excerpts from Images<\/em>, a 1989 suite by Howard Skempton.<\/p>\n

S\u00e9guiner also presented an otherworldly extended solo riff on a large gong that, at its apogee, sounded like a dozen runaway locomotives. This was awesome, in the full sense of the word.<\/p>\n

But the programme had, like the train metaphor, run out of steam, and presented little new as midnight began to loom over our eyelids.<\/p>\n

Toronto Summer Music had tossed aside this year’s theme of La Belle Epoque for one night in order to present something that appeared on paper to be not only hip but generation-crossing and something that defied normal classical concert parameters.<\/p>\n

There were many people present who loudly and enthusiastically voiced their love for the result, but for this tired listener, the evening was more like an opportunity squandered — or, rather, exceeded by excess.<\/p>\n

John Terauds<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although Toronto Summer Music Festival artistic director Douglas McNabney underlined how less is more when it comes to minimalism, the Lab\u00e8que sisters and their Minimalist Dream House Project at Koerner Hall on Thursday night were not just examples of more being more, but of too much being too much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,19,36,38,52,59,63],"tags":[6451,857,1876,3786,3788,6468,6471,3356],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2013\/08\/minimalist.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-3Ho","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14222"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14222"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14244,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14222\/revisions\/14244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14222"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=14222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}