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Bach meets Moondog
Symphony Hall, Birmingham
19 April 2006
Joanna MacGregor
Britten Sinfonia
To
get into the authentic spirit of this music we should have been standing
outside in the rain with the beggars, not sitting in a dispiritingly half-full
Symphony Hall. For the Britten Sinfonia and that indefatigable explorer
of sonic byways, Joanna MacGregor, were revisiting the extraordinary compositions
of Moondog, the blind street musician who for decades plied his trade
in a home-made Viking outfit opposite Carnegie Hall in New York, and counted
among his admirers everyone from Igor Stravinsky and Charlie Parker to
Bob Dylan and William Burroughs.
Kansas-born Moondog (real name
Louis Thomas Hardin) died seven years ago at 83. But the cult popularity
of his proto-minimalist pieces — a jaw-dropping 80 symphonies (admittedly
very short ones) and 300 rounds — grows by the year. I’m not surprised.
He wove fantastical counterpoints, sometimes in a dozen or more parts,
over riffs that evoke Moroccan bazaars or Native American tom-toms as
much as Manhattan jazz clubs.
MacGregor
has taken 14 of Moondog’s pieces and evocatively reconceived them for
a small orchestra, including herself on piano, saxophonist Andy Sheppard,
and a rhythm section featuring the hypnotic patter of the tabla virtuoso
Kuljit Bhamra . Really this music should hit you from four yards away,
not via amplification into rather washy acoustics. You could tell that
myriad interesting things were going on, but not always hear the detail.
That
said, the music’s energy, tunefulness and sheer oddity were mesmerising.
Whistles, sirens and other street sounds all figure. So does singing and
shouting. But Moondog’s real genius was for piling up instrumental lines
like a juggler insouciantly spinning more and more plates. You wait for
the crash, but somehow the whirligig careers merrily on.
In
an inspired bit of programming, an even greater contrapuntalist was summoned
to follow him. MacGregor’s orchestration of Bach’s valedictory tour de
force, The Art of Fugue , is no purist exercise. It’s full of surreally
disembodied chords, wild brass interventions, sudden veiled reminiscences
of a more elegant age, and then frantic jazz interludes that whizz off
at a tangent (none more hair-raising than the stomp that takes over where
Bach’s manuscript breaks off).
But I was riveted. It’s good
news that MacGregor and co are recording it this week.
Richard Morrison, The
Times
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