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Behold! The Masters of Time and Space New York DiMenna Center 08/23/2025 - Steven Kazuo Takasugi: Il Teatro Rosso (United States Premiere)
No Hay Banda: Sarah Albu (Soprano); Geneviève Liboiron (Violin); Emilie Girard-Charest (Cello); Lori Freedman (Bass Clarinet); Felix Del Tredici (Bass Trombone); Daniel Aniez García (Piano); Noam Bierstone (Percussion); Steven Kazuo Takasugi (Musical Direction)
Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière (Sound Engineer); Huei Lin (Video Artist); Jeff D’Ambrosio (Lighting)
 H. Lin/S. K. Takasugi (© Courtesy of the Artists)
“The theater is the place where we can dream together.”
Ariane Mnouchkine
“Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy;/This wide and universal theatre/Presents more woeful pageants than the scene/Wherein we play in.”
William Shakespeare, As You Like It
From the first two splintering notes (an unearthly high scream, followed a fraction later by an eerie bell, all of it taking a fifth of a second), composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi grabbed us, didn’t let go and totally fooled us.
The fooling commenced from two poems on the screen, and a lulling program description about life beginning in the ocean, and how we all wish to return to the murky deep. (So far, so good.) The notes also refer to the comfort of two old Montréal movie theatres.
The lights dim for this final Time:Spans concert series. The six No Hay Banda instrumentalists appear on in one horizontal line, with the statuesque Sarah Albu, resembling an Aztec princess in an Indonesian dance setting.
And the impossible music begins. No, actually composer Takasugi didn’t make music. He made fractional tones. Tones together, tones with hemidemisemiquaver rests. Beats and beeps. Lip‑syncing, bass trombone con sordino, piano plucks and silences.
At first, the exact coordination resembled the unplayable player‑piano of Conlon Nancarrow. Then for those rare chordal-chaotic measures, one inevitably ponders Edgard Varèse.
Finally I found the right simulacrum. Il Teatro Rosso was the antithesis of Balinese gamelan music. Like its pictures Balinese art has neither room nor respect for spaces. Persona and note hang together with people and tintinnabulations. In the usual three hours, we don’t have a single gap, a single lacuna.
Now imagine Balinese music–and its opposite–where every single note lasts for a fragmented fraction, where the spaces between notes are non‑existent (pluckpluckpluck) or with longgggggg spaces in between.
 No Hay Banda (© Courtesy of the Artists)
The program says “Improvisations by No Hay Banda”, yet it was difficult to believe that Mr. Takasugi didn’t write down every disjointed discordant note and quasar‑long fermata.
The aural surprises and Ms. Albu’s non‑verbal cries and whispers were only half of Il Teatro Rosso. Mr. Takasugi’s partner here, Huei Lin, provided magnetic screen images behind the players. Part were live: a fisheye lens circling around the performers; extreme close‑ups of each musician looking stern, with grimacing fingers plunking and pulling, lips on the keys of the bass clarinet. Parts were taken from another performance with different garbs playing the same music.
All of this over an ebony-black background.
A few rare jolts of the film: a janitor cleaning under the piano, hundreds of balls falling by his floor; a few shots of the universe; more extreme shots of Ms. Albu raising her hands in adoration or spastic clumsiness, but always that haunting voice aligned with the spatial tweets of the other six players.
And what did this all signify? Well, if one took Stravinsky’s later philosophy, music signifies nothing except itself. Instead we were looking, hearing–and being looked at, echoing–the sounds and portraits, the jolting images, the fractionally indecipherable rhythms and tones.
Yet Mr. Takasugi had his points. He described the “womb‑red, velvet decor of two old Montréal movie houses. Or “that sweet fetal interiority...now only made possible by a gentle drowning”.
Lovely words, words belied by the pizzicato sounds, Mr. Lin’s unexpected portraits and the precise unpredictable alignment of instruments and vocalist.
Yes, I may have missed that point (though acknowledging the pointillism). So mea culpa, if I couldn’t probe the metaphysics, I relished an hour of color, motion, space and cinematic joy.
So sorry, Messrs Lin and Takasugi, but such delight was happily sufficient.
Harry Rolnick
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