All right, this is my first post and I want to start it off with a review. A (slightly) negative review. I realize this is not the best way to say hello, but somehow the bad shows always provide enough energy to get up and actually make the post.

I attended last night’s concert at Old Cabell Hall. It was a student recital of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” conducted and staged by the ever so creative Maximilian Kayser Frantz.

Some of you may have seen his ensemble “Shrey Tone” at the Bridge’s month of sound. He is a wonderful musician and this post is in no way directed against him personally! In fact, the piece in question was wonderfully rehearsed and performed to perfection. At no point did I feel that this was “merely” a student recital and I was very excited that I would finally get to see a professional performance of a composition by one of my favorite composers. All credit to Maximilian for having dared and, at least musically, succeeded in his undertaking. To get 17 of your friends to work for a year on preparing and then performing a challenging 55 minute piece is even harder than it sounds. I am a musician myself and I know how much work it is to get two of your friends to rehearse a 5 minute piece.

The thing that bugged me out of my mind was that somehow the ensemble, or probably the conductor himself, felt that it was necessary to heighten the experience with an odd mixture of audience participation and a cirque- du- soleil-like gesamtkunstwerk.

 Just as Steve Reich’s psycho-acoustic endeavour started to work on me, a number of students started to run about with colored bed linens, whilst chuckling with embarrassment. Later on there was soap bubble blowing and additional running about. Maximilian had warned about surprises from the audience in his introductory words. He even invited people to dance on stage.

I get the point. Why not underline Reich’s overload of the aural senses by stimulating the visual? Why not make it an all-body experience? Well fine. But tell me also, why rehearse a piece of music for a year and then leave the staging, the little extra, to be what seemed a poorly executed and improvised. It appeared as if the people with sheets and bubbles had been instructed five minutes before the show. In fact some of them were instruced as the piece was going on. Right in front of me.

A friend of mine was talking about a little acoustic bubble that Steve Reich’s music created. It’s a good metaphor for what this music can do. My biggest worry was that it would be played badly. As I said, it was played to perfection. Unfortunately the bubble was burst by the same people who created it.

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