You’ve Got to Admit It’s a Great House
Foremost among a satisfying collection of Boston activities this weekend was the long-anticipated first U.S. performance of Steve Mackey’s Dreamhouse, put on by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project up at Harvard. The performance was fantastic.
It’s not likely to be performed often; I wonder if ever again, though thankfully BMOP is producing a recording. Dreamhouse, by all rights, should persist as some kind of cult classic. It’s a huge production: five vocalists, including a lead part that Rinde Eckert and only Rinde Eckert is equipped to sing; electric guitar quartet; large orchestra.
Mackey’s program note for the piece provides the thematic background; you can find it on his website along with the libretto. The text's unfocused array of scenes and musings is matched by the energetic sprawl of the work, 45 minutes in total, which lands on and flits away from themes and developments usually without staying on any one thing for more than a couple of minutes at a time. The big exception to this is the tune that spins out for the last several minutes of the piece, an immediately catchy, drifting melody setting the words “I’ll build you a dreamhouse, where you can live, where you’ll be safe”—the central spirit of the piece, a melody at once an advertising jingle and a sad call to an impossible belief. It repeats over and over in variations for the vocalists and bigger swaths of the orchestra, growing from a dreamy whisper to a full-throated anthem to a rougher, bombastic conclusion.
Beforehand it’s a kitchen-sink grab bag of riffs, outbursts, lopsided grooves, and shaded pools of harmony, with the vocalists bopping along and the orchestra throwing big rough-edged splashes of color around, often underlined by the guitars’ rocky crunch. Mackey started composing as a 21-year-old kid who’d been playing electric guitar and then fell in love with Stravinsky, and Dreamhouse reflects that pretty perfectly.
It’s quirky, flawed, and ingenious, and it worked extremely well in concert. The one real problem was the inability to make out the singers’ lyrics whenever the music got at all loud, which is pretty often. I’m not sure whether this would improve in different spaces. (Otherwise the acoustics were fine, and the sound design in the other half of the concert seemed very impressive.) I think you just get five miked singers and four electric guitars onstage with a huge orchestra, and something’s going to get lost in the mix.
Eckert, who also wrote the text, has this resonant falsetto register with a cartoonish warble to it. He’s well over six feet tall and has a bald, bulb-like head, so it’s a striking image when he’s onstage. Oddly he looked very reined in, not vocally but physically; just standing there, despite a couple of mini-dramatic movements.
BMOP itself sounds incredibly good, and very tight, especially for an orchestra that only gives several concerts a year. Their conductor, Gil Rose, must have a handle on things too, considering how difficult this program was. If mainstream orchestras threw themselves into even a little bit of new music this vibrant and extroverted it’s hard to think at least a few people wouldn’t start to notice.
(House frame image courtesy the Internet.)
It’s not likely to be performed often; I wonder if ever again, though thankfully BMOP is producing a recording. Dreamhouse, by all rights, should persist as some kind of cult classic. It’s a huge production: five vocalists, including a lead part that Rinde Eckert and only Rinde Eckert is equipped to sing; electric guitar quartet; large orchestra.Mackey’s program note for the piece provides the thematic background; you can find it on his website along with the libretto. The text's unfocused array of scenes and musings is matched by the energetic sprawl of the work, 45 minutes in total, which lands on and flits away from themes and developments usually without staying on any one thing for more than a couple of minutes at a time. The big exception to this is the tune that spins out for the last several minutes of the piece, an immediately catchy, drifting melody setting the words “I’ll build you a dreamhouse, where you can live, where you’ll be safe”—the central spirit of the piece, a melody at once an advertising jingle and a sad call to an impossible belief. It repeats over and over in variations for the vocalists and bigger swaths of the orchestra, growing from a dreamy whisper to a full-throated anthem to a rougher, bombastic conclusion.
Beforehand it’s a kitchen-sink grab bag of riffs, outbursts, lopsided grooves, and shaded pools of harmony, with the vocalists bopping along and the orchestra throwing big rough-edged splashes of color around, often underlined by the guitars’ rocky crunch. Mackey started composing as a 21-year-old kid who’d been playing electric guitar and then fell in love with Stravinsky, and Dreamhouse reflects that pretty perfectly.
It’s quirky, flawed, and ingenious, and it worked extremely well in concert. The one real problem was the inability to make out the singers’ lyrics whenever the music got at all loud, which is pretty often. I’m not sure whether this would improve in different spaces. (Otherwise the acoustics were fine, and the sound design in the other half of the concert seemed very impressive.) I think you just get five miked singers and four electric guitars onstage with a huge orchestra, and something’s going to get lost in the mix.
Eckert, who also wrote the text, has this resonant falsetto register with a cartoonish warble to it. He’s well over six feet tall and has a bald, bulb-like head, so it’s a striking image when he’s onstage. Oddly he looked very reined in, not vocally but physically; just standing there, despite a couple of mini-dramatic movements.
BMOP itself sounds incredibly good, and very tight, especially for an orchestra that only gives several concerts a year. Their conductor, Gil Rose, must have a handle on things too, considering how difficult this program was. If mainstream orchestras threw themselves into even a little bit of new music this vibrant and extroverted it’s hard to think at least a few people wouldn’t start to notice.
(House frame image courtesy the Internet.)
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