Considering the horrifying real-life atrocity that inspired “My Lai,” the absorbing monodrama performed by tenor Rinde Eckert and the Kronos Quartet on Friday night at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, the thing that most impressed me was the work’s overall restraint.
The 85-minute music theater piece for voice, string quartet and Vietnamese instruments, by composer Jonathan Berger and librettist Harriet Scott Chessman, was given for the first time in October at a Kronos concert at Stanford University, where Berger teaches. Friday’s performance here marked the world premiere of the staged version, which was commissioned by the Harris Theater.
The My Lai massacre resonates to this day as a watershed in the history of modern American combat: the slaughter of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops in the village of My Lai in 1968, a turning point in the public perception of the Vietnam War. The soldiers were on a search-and-destroy mission to root out enemy fighters in Viet Cong territory, yet no Viet Cong were present, and almost all the victims were women, children and the elderly. Only one of the soldiers involved in the slaughter, Lt. William Calley, was ever convicted of criminal acts.
The central figure of “My Lai” is Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr., a helicopter pilot on a routine reconnaissance mission who tried to stop the carnage, even threatening to open fire on his own troops. It is three decades later, and Thompson, who’s dying of cancer, paces the floor of his hospice room, his mind a jumble of recollections, some clear, others distorted. Initially branded as a traitor, he regards himself as no hero, nor even especially proud of what he did, only a decent soldier doing what he believed was right as wanton bloodshed raged around him.
Thompson’s confused musings took center stage, couched in effective, recitativelike lines mixed with fragments of wistful arioso. The half-spoken, half-sung vocal writing moved in sometimes jagged, expressionistic intervals, the character’s recollections peppered with obscenities common to GI-speak, especially in the heat of battle. Chessman’s memory play mixes poetry, slang and hurt with fierce brilliance.
The Kronos players churned out growly thickets of notes, pages of anguished arpeggios and contrasting stretches of elegiac calm to relieve the pervasive agitation, despair and dread. There were several haunting, quiet interludes for instruments alone; Berger’s music was most eloquent when it spoke most simply. Still, the music was there mostly to support the vocal and dramatic performance with color, mood and atmosphere.
Delicately woven through the textures of the Western stringed instruments were the distinctive timbres of the three Vietnamese instruments, skillfully played by Van-Anh Vo — dan bau (single-string box zither), the smaller dan tranh (16-string board zither) and trung (a suspended, helix-shaped xylophone made of bamboo tubes). Their resonant harmonics and fluid pitches offset the Kronos’ harsher, amplified sound nicely.
But it was Eckert’s tour de force performance that dominated “My Lai.” The tenor’s strong technique coped splendidly with the high-lying vocal lines. Eckert was never more sympathetic than when the dying man’s confused mind imagined himself as a contestant on an inane ’60s TV game show whose cheery master of ceremonies kept getting history horribly wrong. And how touching were Thompson’s words, “I always wanted to fly,” uttered at the beginning and as a closing sort-of benediction. I couldn’t imagine a finer singing actor in this role.
The brief, scene-setting prologue was Berger’s “My Lai Lullaby,” for quartet and Vietnamese instruments alone. Out of the discordant frenzy of strings rose, phoenixlike, a faint haze of prerecorded children’s voices, snatches of all-American blues and the pure, clear harmonic twangs of the dan bau.
‘Hand Eye’ at MCA
Another intriguing example of contemporary multimedia classical music was on display last weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where the Chicago-based new-music ensemble eighth blackbird gave the local premiere of “Hand Eye.” The two sold-out concerts were part of the sextet’s seasonlong residency at the museum, in celebration of the group’s 20th anniversary.
The blackbirds’ latest collaboration, presented on the MCA Stage series, was unusual even for them. Each of the six pieces that make up “Hand Eye” is by a different composer, and each composer is a member of the collective known as Sleeping Giant.
The eclectic, quasi-theatrical suite was jointly conceived by composers Christopher Cerrone, Andrew Norman, Robert Honstein, Timo Andres, Ted Hearne and Jacob Cooper, who took their inspiration from artworks from the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art collection. The component parts were presented without breaks between pieces. Matthew Ozawa directed, with live projections by Deborah Johnson.
If there was a narrative arc to “Hand Eye,” I missed it. The theater was kept in darkness throughout the 90-minute duration, and the absence of breaks between works made it almost impossible to tell who wrote what. Also, the incessant, twitchy nervosity of the squiggles, dots, lines and other abstract images projected on a screen behind the musicians soon outstayed its welcome.
Even so, the blackbirds threw themselves into each jointly memorized piece with enough of their typically fierce virtuosity, energy and commitment to pull the audience into the music as the players prowled the stage, striking up musical and visual connections as they went.
Most of the works had in common a kind of hopped-up, post-minimalist drive made up of motoric rhythmic figures erupting in asymmetrical patterns and frenzied bursts of activity. Cerrone’s “South Catalina” was the aural equivalent of blinding Southern California light, and I enjoyed the quirky relay race of Norman’s “Mine, Mime, Meme,” in which five players mimicked and finally subverted cellist Nicholas Photinos’ chantlike cello lines.
Eighth blackbird will be back at the MCA Stage on March 25 to 26 for performances of David T. Little’s “Ghostlight,” and other new works.
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @jvonrhein
