Formenti Creates Mesmerizing Chaos

When Marino Formenti, the Italian pianist who specializes in contemporary music, gave his first U.S. recital at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art two years ago, he proved to be one of the most exciting pianists I have ever encountered. He has been overdue to make a more mainstream appearance, and at last the Eclectic Orange Festival 2001 gave him that opportunity Tuesday night at the Founders Hall of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

One doesn’t sit back and listen to Formenti. Instead, he forces you to feel as though you are an active participant in a kind of music sport. He throws the sound at you and you either duck or catch it.

He began with the West Coast premiere of “Serynade,” written by Helmut Lachenmann last year. A German composer whom Americans have been slow to discover, Lachenmann is an anthropologist of sonority. He digs for sounds that underlie sounds, showing us where they come from and what has happened to them. At one point around the middle of the 19-minute score, Formenti hit a rich chord many times, and each time there was something brand new about it. It seemed like magic.

Indeed, all through Lachenmann’s spellbinding piece, Formenti gave the feeling that he was pulling sonic rabbits out of the hat, as one mystifying effect followed another. His feet, working the pedals, were nearly as active as his fingers. Throwing his body into the keyboard, he keeps the attention riveted. It hardly mattered how this piece unfolded in time; on first hearing, it was far too engrossing on a minute-to-minute basis to even think about anything else.

John Adams’ “Phrygian Gates,” from 1977, which followed, is 25 minutes of perpetual motion, written in a style reminiscent of Steve Reich. It has a few personal touches, where there is a sweetening of the harmony or a quirky off-beat pattern of clinking high notes. Formenti brought to the score a remarkable dynamic tension. Rather than Minimalism’s usual sense of time suspended, this felt like momentum frozen in time. He was pressing forward with such enormous urgency, it didn’t matter where he was going.

The big work after intermission was Jean Barraque’s Sonata. Two years ago at LACMA, Formenti played this famous, rigorous 45-minute essay in Serialist entanglement in 23 minutes. Tuesday he shaved nearly another minute off that record. Formenti does everything his way, and here his way is to exult in complexity to the extent that the performance becomes an exercise in bounding energy.

There are those who say that only comforting old music right now can help us out of our fears of terrorism. But Formenti’s performance of Barraque proved that to be nonsense. Nothing could be more life-affirming than witnessing him become the incredible master of chaos.