Composer Claude Vivier approaches the unknowable with a text delivered by a septet of vocalists in a language of his own invention. But the new production adds overly literal video, trading abstraction for the obvious.
Cage hoped that the change from “pinch-penny mental attitudes to courageous wastefulness” would become as prevalent in the arts as it is in nature. Along those lines, his late choral music is spare, seemingly simple: quiet, almost fragile sounds scattered over silences.
