CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Animated bubbles rose from the pillars of four harps. Aquamarine waves flowed toward us and surrounded us. Revolving laser lights played upon silent infusions of smoke and mists, forming clouds and starbursts above.
John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, conducted by Yaniv Dinur on Feb. 28 at the newly unveiled Blume Studios, was not a typical Charlotte Symphony program. It was an elaborately crafted experience. All of the orchestra and all of the audience were together in a vast shoebox, walled by white curtains punctuated only by exit doors. The only people elevated above the musicians were Dinur, haloed in a spotlight, and the phalanx of lighting and sound technicians at the rear of the hall.
Touring Broadway shows usually bring fewer board operators to the Belk Theater soundbooth. Creative directors Aaron Mccoy and Ian Robinson, projections designer Jeff Cason, and lighting designer/laserist Jay Huleatt were duly listed in the orchestra’s digital program as members of the production team headed by co-producers Bree Stallings and Scott Freck.
Likely they took their cue — and its immersive drift — from Adams’ own words, written before the live 2013 premiere of the work by the Seattle Symphony, which commissioned it: “We came from the ocean, and we’re going back to the ocean, right? We’re made up mostly of water, and life on earth first emerged from the seas. And with the melting of the polar ice caps and the rising sea levels, we may become ocean sooner than we imagine.”
For all of its gorgeous waveforms, colors, and lights, there was no mistaking the doomsday lifelessness of the massive projections. No fish or mammals inhabited these waters. No crawlies moved or glimmered on seawalls. The smallest bubbles might be imagined to suggest primal cellular life, and translucent forms taking shape in the deep could be seen as lazy jellyfish if you didn’t require intentionality. Plant forms occasionally appeared on the ocean floor, always motionless, never as fragile or temporal as grass.
Additional golden light gently flooded Dinur’s players, so when we reached the darkest ocean depths, we might see them as a hopeful golden glow, guiding us forward through the gloom. The feel of the Charlotte performance, notwithstanding all the electronics, was organic.
Unlike a “Symphony at the Movies” concert, conductor and orchestra didn’t calibrate their tempo with a soundtrack. On the contrary, the techs at the back of the hall were able to interweave their effects and projection episodes in sync with the musicians. The even, somewhat glacial pacing of Adams’ score certainly eased the synchronization to the point where it consistently felt seamless.
The composer’s scenario, if there is one, does not begin with theatrical catastrophe or cosmic apocalypse. More like Debussy’s La mer, the opening rises up gradually out of silence, evoking the infinite. Seated midway between the front and rear of the space along the right-side audience wall, where the orchestra seated us in order to best hear the score, my wife and I couldn’t really discern exactly when the music reached us after Dinur gave his downbeat.
It almost seemed to emerge — via double basses, contrabassoon, and maybe tuba — from the lower depths of human audibility, more like a hearing test than melodic music when first discernible. If we’d insisted on seats that offered a view of the musicians, the effect would not have been as mystifying. On this level playing field, with its wretched sight lines to the orchestra, we were prodded into looking upwards and around us.
Even with a conspicuous absence of violins in the initial murmurs and the emerging soundweave, the score was not devoid of sweetness. Wave forms layered onto the low subterranean drone surely emanated from the harps. Whatever Adams added on to these rising and falling arpeggios from the marimbas, vibraphones, celesta, and bells only added an electronic roundness — and a dim metallic glow — to the harps’ liquid ostinatos. The crystallization of all this unseen plucking of soft pounding became quite magical.
Without cataclysm or catastrophe, Become Ocean could be experienced in a variety of ways, subtly aided by the light show. There was the gradual seduction of immersion in the liquid deep when we surrendered to it, each one of us at a different moment. Perhaps we moved further toward an acclimation to Adams’ prompt — proclaimed out loud by the sound system, like an epigraph preceding the performance — that this is “where we came from.”
As the projections evolved from abstract auroras and drifting bubbles to more solid shapes — waves, undersea gorges, boulders, and petrified plants — evidence mounted that the production team’s concept took us far, far away from the pivotal moments of environmental catastrophe. By now, millions of years after birds, men, reptiles, amphibians, and fish had breathed their last gulps of oxygen, we had become ocean in the sense that we were the hopeful spirit of a potential rebirth of life.
The structures of the score and the complementary projections open the doors to other interpretations. We could puzzle out the meaning when brass became as prominent as the harp and percussion ensembles. We could decide — or not — whether the extended whistling from the woodwinds was ominous or a hopeful sign.
In the longer scheme of planetary transformation, a similar ambiguity hovers over the long, cataclysmic build near the end of this sea odyssey that crests with timpani, bass drums, and a muted trumpet. While it’s tempting to assume that this peak, subsiding into a quietude with sounds that evoked the funereal tolling of a bell, was the sealing of our doom, my reading was more upbeat.
The sea-shaking impact, millions of years from today, could signify a distant collision with an extraterrestrial object or force that eventually brings life back. The tolling would then signal a restarting of time.
What became clearer during this Charlotte Symphony performance piloted by Dinur was that Adams’ Become Ocean still merits all of its accolades, aging well since it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. The Stalling-Freck production team has collaborated beautifully with the orchestra and its new Blume Studios facility. Their multi-media addition never trivializes this epic symphony. Nor does it constrain the visceral takeaways we can experience with the music. On the contrary, these dovetailing visual elements add whole new dimensions of meaning and engagement, increasing the intensity of an already powerful work.
