Hollywood Bowl: American Music and Martha Graham

REVIEW: Los Angeles Philharmonic, Christopher Wilkins, conductor
with the Martha Graham Dance Company
Barber - Overture to The School for Scandal
Barber - excerpt from "Medea," featuring the Graham company
Barber - Violin Concerto, op. 14 (Martin Chalifour, violin)
Copland - Appalachian Spring, featuring the Graham company
September 9, 2004 | Hollywood Bowl

Modern American music and two of its composers were the subject of Thursday night's Los Angeles Philharmonic concert at the Hollywood Bowl, performed underneath an exceptionally warm September night sky that ultimately provided the perfect setting for the evening. The concert's headlining attraction was the appearance of the Martha Graham Dance Company – itself a pioneering American institution – who in its heyday worked closely with American composers to create great ballets set to equally great pieces original of music. Of those works, the Hollywood Bowl audience saw the Graham company dance “Appalachian Spring,” which has a score composed by Aaron Copland that stands very well on its own as a piece of symphonic music. Also on the program, preceding "Appalachian Spring," was an excerpt from the ballet "Cave of the Heart," a retelling of the Greek tragedy “Medea” set to a score by Samuel Barber.

And despite the Graham company's generally fine performances, it was the music which took center stage on Thursday night (as is often the case with dance at the Hollywood Bowl). A huge, 18.000 seat outdoor amphitheatre, the Bowl lacks the intimacy that most dance – especially dance like the Graham company’s – would like to have in most ideal situations. Sitting any farther back than the third section (there are 7 in all), the dancers look like ants, especially against the visual clutter of the orchestra sitting in the background. Even with large, new projector screens broadcasting the stage activities to the upper reaches of the amphitheatre, there are problems: the cameras focusing on the wrong parts of the action, or zooming in too closely on wrong parts of the dancers’ bodies. As a result, the effect of the dancing is diminished for the audience and the orchestra wins, since the aural sound – even processed through giant speakers – is the only thing that is properly reaching much of the audience.

Thursday night, under conductor Christopher Wilkins’ baton, the Los Angeles Philharmonic deftly navigated the musical program of pieces by Barber and Copland. In addition to the aforementioned Copland and Barber ballets, there were also Barber’s Overture from “The School for Scandal” and his opus 14 violin concerto.

Philharmonic concertmaster and first violinist Martin Chalifour led the orchestra through the violin concerto, one of the evening’s main highlights. The piece is both Romantic in tone and modern in feeling, with its juxtaposition of sweet musical phrases against a curious rhythmic underpinning. On top of the orchestra’s fine performance, there was the Hollywood Bowl’s outdoor setting, in the midst of lushly treed and landscaped portion of the Hollywood Hills, underneath the night sky. During the concerto’s quietly thrilling second movement – a slower paced andante portion – a breeze lightly ruffled the on-stage curtain, creating no less than an ideal place to listen to Barber’s meltingly lyrical concerto.

As for the Martha Graham Dance Company, it performed quite well despite the odd space of the Hollywood Bowl; because of the size of the stage and orchestra, the dancers only got a relatively small strip towards the front of the stage in which to dance. The smaller space worked fine for the intimate nature of “Cave of the Heart” and “Appalachian Spring,” though in “Appalachian,” some of the dancers looked noticeably constrained.

The excerpt from “Cave of the Heart” is the finale of the “Medea” story, in which Medea takes revenge on her lover Jason by killing their two children. In Graham’s ballet, it is a solo dance; Medea’s children are symbolically represented by a red ribbon, which Medea pulls out of her chest and then eats. The dancing is intense, angular and jagged, with quick sudden movements interspersed with large open gestures, such as an arching kick. As Medea, Fang Yi-Sheu danced with a fiery intensity. Her performance was rendered somewhat odd, however, by the cameras used for the Bowl projector screens, which zoomed straight in on her face. As a consequence, her facial expressions looked over-exaggerated since she was dancing to be seen by a live audience, not a tightly zoomed-in television camera.

“Appalachian Spring,” which took up the second half of Thursday’s program, is the story of a bride and a young farmer husband as they move into a new home, presumably on the American frontier. The music is airy and light, reflecting a sense of openness and hope, thus giving the ballet a very American-dream sense of optimism. Interspersed in through the score are folksy passages – such as an old American folk song now made popular as the main theme to “Lord of the Dance” – and pieces that feel like a square dance. The ballet is a major Graham piece, and the company moved its way through it, highlighted by the performances of Miki Orihara and Tadej Brdnik as the bride and her husband, respectively. But the pioneer girls seemed restrained – possibly constricted by the smaller stage space – and it was hard to recognize the full impact of anything else in such a wide-open audience space. Hopefully, next time the Graham company returns to Los Angeles, it will do so in a more intimate theatre.