'Intermezzo' strikes discordant notes in art and music

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): A figure gradually took shape on the darkened stage, aided by a single spotlight from above. Robin Clavreul sat center stage, his cello between his legs. The vision was chillingly austere.

Irsa Destiwi took her place at the piano. Slender, with long flowing hair, she could have stepped out from one of Titis Jabaruddin's paintings in the left wing of the Gedung Kesenian lobby.

They started playing, and so unfolded the first part of Intermezzo: a heartfelt ode to French music.

It was a tricky opening. Claude Debussy's Sonata is a gold mine of nuances and imageries. Most of them are breakaways from traditional harmony: unresolved dissonances, unrelated chords. Then there are those disarmingly beautiful old church modes, bringing to mind Debussy's other celebrated work, La Cathedrale Engloutie.

More generally, a sonata is an intricate dance, with the lead constantly shifting from one to the other. In a duo, it is important to have an instinct for each other's timing and dynamics to be able to fuse the music's many elements into one flowing atmospheric statement.

The night was still young and the duo had not jelled. Irsa's problem was classic: she seemed to realize that the cello, perhaps the most difficult instrument to accompany, requires a pianist with a soft and sensitive pedal.

So she held back.

But they finally found each other in Gabriel Faure's exquisite Elegie. This is an exceedingly intimate and poetic piece that thoroughly deserves Clavreul's deep and rounded strokes.

Irsa, 16, also found her touch, and it was a touch that pretty much described nearly all of Faure's work: sensitive, cultivated, delicately lyrical. Her musical maturity certainly goes beyond her years

The duo continued in this inspired manner throughout Henry Duparc's rarely performed sonata (composed when he was just 19), and J.S.Bach's supremely serene Ave Maria.

The wonderful Duparc sonata practically bounced with life and vitality, its varied colors and textures richly conveyed. A haunting, crystalline passage in the second movement recalls the expressive simplicity of Francis Poulenc's Tale of Barbar.

"The cello," the late Jacqueline du Pre, perhaps the most celebrated celist of all time, "is something basic and earthy, coming from one's guts and one's heart." That evening, Clavreul did just that.

And now to Intermezzo's second, much-awaited part. Again, it opened with Clavreul sitting in the dark, like an apparition. Suddenly, a galaxy of stars appeared behind him, subtly flickering like dragonflies. The faint sound of a gong permeated the hall.

Soon, smoke billowed from behind a silky, transparent screen. The set was unveiled, and gradually turned into a scintillating play of light. The colors -- vermilion, aquamarine, mauve, burnished terra-cotta -- were gorgeous.

There, in the heavenly tinted crossfire, stood a canvas awaiting Titis Jabaruddin's masterful strokes.

As the duo dipped into the contemporary music of G. Scelsi, Luciano Berio and D. Chostakovitch, two artists began their journey into uncharted territory.

Titis Jabaruddin determinedly seized the brush and began painting. Agus Jolly, at one point bedecked in scraps of metal, was a sight both ambiguous and disturbing, as he teetered for what seemed a very long time on the periphery of the stage.

The concept of two individuals doing their own thing, each reacting to the same music, was undeniably intriguing. But they formed a tawdry counterpoint to the strongly integrated music.

The duo's position at the front of the stage hardly qualified them as "musical accompaniment". They were the main attraction and the rest were merely "props".

Esthetically speaking, Titis was a complementary kind of "prop". Her canvas' position directly behind the duo gave a triangular sensibility to their collaboration.

There was something genuinely enchanting about witnessing a painting taking shape from scratch. It was not just any painting. At the end of the concert, the work was to be auctioned off.

Fifty percent of its proceeds would be donated to victims of starvation in Irian Jaya.

In stark contrast, Agus Jolly moved in slow motion, mostly relying on the contortions of his face and body to convey his agitation. Reducing a political statement to silent motion has never been easy. But his "connection" with the music seemed forced, insincere and disconcertingly incongruous. That connection simply did not exist.

We knew from the program notes that Agus was trying to offer himself up as a metaphor for humanity in adversity. The allusions to the burning forests of Kalimantan and Sumatra, for instance, were obvious enough, thanks to the self-explanatory costume.

Less discernible were the more abstract crises, such as the current economic recession.

At one point, he got so close to the piano as to crouch next to it, and for too brief a moment his pain and despair were quite visible. But he ultimately saw no hope and retreated into the background, back to the periphery where he belonged. The duo was like the system he tried to reason with, ultimately too strong and dominant for him to challenge.

Yet this was what it ultimately boiled down to. The sheer force of the music was so overwhelming that it practically wiped out the rest into oblivion.

When the whole thing was over, and the opening bid of US$3,000 for Titis' painting was thrown to the audience, it was clear the gaping void was making the audience restless. That was despite the auction's noble objective.