A congress of noise convened in Jordan Hall

November 16, 2009|Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff

The human desire to produce a loud noise by striking one object with another must be as old as communication itself, and like all histories, it has its high points and lows. The period between the two world wars, for instance, was a very good time for the art and science of banging. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project reminded us of this fact on Friday night with a memorable concert that was in equal parts ambitious musical event, cultural time warp, and sonic magical mystery tour.

The night began and ended with landmarks of that period: Varese’s “Ionisation,’’ a brief work heard somewhat frequently, here given a fluid and meticulous account, and Antheil’s infamous “Ballet Mécanique,’’ a piece that prowls the history books but is almost never spotted in the flesh.

Both works are inseparable from the period of their creation, a time when composers were breaking rules, issuing manifestos, dreaming of novel scales and instruments, and often linking their works not to Romantic myths of individual struggle but to the hurly-burly of everyday modern industrial life. When George Antheil set to work in 1923 on his great paean to pounding, he strove for something, in his own words, “brutal, contemporary, hard-boiled, symbolic of the spiritual exhaustion’’ of the day.

To accomplish this goal, Antheil’s score convenes a kind of absurdist spectacle, a congress of noise, for sirens, airplane propellers, xylophones, bass drums, grand pianos, and, originally, a fleet of 16 mechanized player pianos. It was a vision out of reach in his own day mostly because the player pianos could not be suitably synchronized. More recently the composer Paul Lehrman has placed contemporary technology at the service of Antheil’s original ideal. Friday’s performance featured eight Yamaha Disklaviers on the Jordan Hall stage linked by Lehrman’s own computer interface. The propeller noise was prerecorded. Gil Rose conducted from a click-track delivered through a wireless earpiece, while Lehrman himself manipulated the piercing wail of the sirens with the controller from a Nintendo Wii. It was something to behold: digital technology as midwife to outrageous analog dreams.

Fortunately, some eight decades after its Paris premiere, Antheil’s score has not lost its ability to harass and delight the senses with its sheer audacity. Friday’s performance produced a glorious din, with vast sheets of machine-tooled rhythm, interwoven layers of cacophony, and sudden gaps of ghostly silence. Visually speaking, the most memorable sight was witnessing that octet of Yamaha pianos playing themselves, a kind of depopulated orchestra eerily appropriate for a work written in the wake of the First World War.