It all started in the Stalinist Russia of 1936,
when someone posted an “anonymous” editorial attacking Shostakovich’s
formally bold opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in the Communist newspaper Pravda. The officially authorized critique ushered in an
era in which the Soviet government’s restrictive pronouncements on the
correct uses of art, music, film and media had a dampening impact on the
creative schemes of Russian and Soviet-bloc artists.
As part of the L.A. Phil’s ongoing “Shadow
of Stalin” music, film and symposia series probing in part that most
excellent side-product of political tyranny — deviously deepened artistic
expression — there’ll be a night titled “Pravda” on Saturday, May 26, at
Disney Concert Hall, where an astutely chosen group of DJs, VJs, visual
artists and live musicians will absorb, interpret and thoroughly transmute
the art and music of the Stalinist era, including mashups and meltdowns of
recordings by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Gubaidulina, Schnittke, Popov,
Mosolov and others, as well as films such as Battleship Potemkin,
Alexander Nevsky, The Cranes Are Flying and Soy Cuba, along
with rare footage from Russian documentaries, interviews and propaganda
films.
The program boasts a crucial team of
progressive and genre-wiping artists in the DJ/electronic sphere, equipped
with turntables, laptops, yes, real live instruments, plus vid-jockeying
software and projectors to pull the Russian reactive/defensive art of the
mid-20th century into an unfamiliar yet sympathetic context. Conceptual
artist DJ Spooky is among the highest-profile artists in the lineup.
Spooky’s a far-reaching pointyhead turntablist who has collaborated with
and/or refigured such “serious” composers as Iannis Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pierre Boulez and Steve Reich, and whose work
has been presented in the imposing monoliths of the Whitney Biennial, the
Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Kunsthalle in Vienna and the Andy
Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. L.A.’s most extremely radical (but funky)
DJ/musique concretists Cut Chemist, J-Rocc, Peanut Butter Wolf, Mumbles & Gone Beyond and guests from the
exhilaratingly open-minded Dublab Soundsystem further thaw out and
reconstruct the Russian masters. Of particular note is the appearance by
Brazilian-Anglo DJ/sound artist Amon Tobin, whose highly cinematic
structures built on arcane sample sources and dark-velvet low end is a
strange and beautiful thing to see, hear and feel; he’ll be incorporating
material from his superb Foley Room disc on Ninja Tune. And all the while, Norton Wisdom will paint
quite spontaneously onstage.
At midnight, local pipe-organ wizard
Christoph Bull performs a specially themed set of material, and there’ll be
an appearance by a 10-theremin orchestra that will re-create the 1932 Ten
Theremin Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall conducted by the instrument’s
inventor, Leon Theremin. The evening also features a special tribute to the
late Robert Moog, in celebration of his birthday. Stroll the entire grounds
to glimpse Russian films and propaganda images projected on TV monitors and
various surfaces of the hall; music will be broadcast outside the main
auditorium as well, and BP Hall becomes a DJ danceteria till the wee hours
o’ the morning — context, all is context...
Note for those reading this on
Thursday, May 24: “Russian Chanson,” at 8 p.m. at Disney Hall, features
Denver’s bouzouki-mad Gypsy-folk ensemble Devotchka, bearded alterna-folk
icon Devendra Banhart and esteemed freestyle-speedstyle
poet-rapper-writer Saul Williams plus additional guests in a program
exploring the history of underground “anti-folk” musical movements with
roots in Russian protest.
