Everyone who attended “The Party” Saturday night at the Logan Square/Avondale Arts Center was told right on the cover of the program: “This is not a concert. This is an experience.”
So the nature and kind of experience was more significant than any of its parts or even that it was conceived by pianist-conductor Marino Formenti and carried out by Ensemble Dal Niente, the first-rate Chicago group dedicated to contemporary music.
The experience offered 21 pieces by 16 composers spread out over more than six hours, and the longer you were there the more troubling the format became.
Both the printed program and Formenti reminded attendees that music was the centerpiece of “The Party.” This achieved a high degree of quiet whenever the music was playing. But the average length of a piece was 10 minutes, and most of the works were separated by breaks that lasted at least as long, during which everyone ate and talked and walked and drank.
Given that two lounges set apart from the main room allowed such activities even during the music, the emphasis of the evening seemed to shift according to how long you were present. If you chatted and listened and whooped and ran, maybe the experience of music somehow remained central. But if you stayed for more than four hours, as I did, breaks from the music assumed ever more weight until the playing was felt to interrupt the socializing, as art does at an exhibition opening.
Gong strokes alternately announced music and food. Where the crowd quieted expectantly for the opening three selections from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s teasing “Tierkreis,” silence proved a lot harder to achieve three hours on for Salvatore Sciarrino’s sputtering “Muro d’Orizzonte.” Each composer on the program – Iannis Xenakis to Morton Feldman – wrote challenging music that requires time to turn over in the mind, but the relaxation encouraged on Saturday conveyed more escape than engagement, which certainly made for an experience but not much of a concert.
