Though hidden away and not much promoted, “Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary” -- the captivating MOCA show –- cannot be kept quiet. When it opened in November, the Greek composer’s electronic sound field, “Polytope de Persépolis,” was installed at Los Angeles State Historic Park for an hour’s assault on eardrums. The next day, his extraordinary ritualistic opera, “Oresteia,” had its West Coast premiere at CalArts.

The show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center gallery closes on Friday, so last weekend was a last excuse to make a Xenakis ruckus. CalArts’ Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology (CEAIT) presented a Xenakis festival -- three evenings of concerts along with two symposia -- at REDCAT. I was only able to attend the Sunday program, by which time you might have assumed Xenakis zealotry would have died down.

Not at all. Xenakis wrote music of nerve-wracking intensity, complexity and often volume that draws diverse audiences. That includes architecture fans (Xenakis worked with Corbusier), complexity addicts, electro-acoustic geeks and  young rockers intrigued by the sheer physicality and strangeness of this sound world. On Sunday there was something for all.

The violinist and conductor Mark Menzies, who put the programs together, wrote that he felt Xenakis’ earlier music is often neglected in favor the composer’s later works (Xenakis died in 2001). But the program was properly diverse and while three of the pieces were from the ‘70s, “Epicycles,” the world’s strangest short cello concerto, was written in 1989.

As a fighter in the Greek resistance during World War II, Xenakis suffered an explosion that destroyed part of his face. So one way to hear the duo “Dikhthas,” from 1979 for violin and piano (Menzies and Dzovig Markarian), might be as blasts of chords, clusters, single notes, sliding tones on the violin, functioning like dazzling sonic shrapnel. Time here has a mind of its own. The piece verges on the impossible, and the performance was brilliant.   
  
A decade later, Xenakis had slowed down some in “Epicycles.” The solo cello (the excellent Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick) moves in irregular thumping beats. A small ensemble does, too, but not necessarily at the same time. Winds and brass play fantastic harmonies and let them resonate a long while. There is a lot of funny business in the strings. Menzies conducted a student ensemble in a precise, forceful performance that evoked unknown worlds.

In “Akanthos” (1977), a violin (Lorenz Gamma) and soprano (Maurita Thornburgh) dominate an ensemble of nine. This is raw, unattractive music, not quite so unknown, not quite so appealingly weird, but the solo violin sections were gripping.

The concert began and ended with electronic music. The opener was Curtis Roads' “Flicker Tone Pulse,” which the composer controlled from a soundboard during the performance.  The seven short pieces, fashioned from Xenakis’ procedures, are carefully polished sound objects. Beautiful bubbling electronic effects surrounded the audience so we might examine them from every angle. They were accompanied by lively flickering visual that Brian O’Reilly produced live.
 
Xenakis' “Polytope de Cluny,” an enveloping electronic score intended for a large cathedral space, was the festival grand finale. A deep roar shook the ground, and for 25 minutes there was the profound sensation of tectonic movement. REDCAT has a great sound system and Roads ran the equipment expertly, assuring that loudness remained below the level of pain but reached the point where sound pressure is both a pleasure to the ear and, in its vibrations, to the body.

RELATED

  Xenakis heads West   

-- Mark Swed

Photo: Brian O'Reilly mixes live multimedia at REDCAT Sunday. Credic: Stefano Paltera/Los Angeles Times.

The Smithsonian Institution announced Monday that it would create a panel to preview and provide an opportunity for public comment about future exhibitions that could prove sensitive.

The move comes after G. Wayne Clough, secretary of the Smithsonian, pulled a piece of artwork from the exhibition "Hide and Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" in November after the video, David Wojnarowicz's "A Fire in My Belly," was criticized by the Catholic League and several Republican members of Congress as being "anti-Christian."

The museum also recommended that "in the absence of actual error, changes to exhibitions should not be made once an exhibition opens without meaningful consultation with the curator, director, secretary and the leadership of the Board of Regents." 

The Smithsonian also made other recommendations. For the complete story, check back with Culture Monster.

RELATED:

Complete Smithsonian coverage

Group protests art censorship at Smithsonian chief's speech in L.A.

Critic's notebook: Smithsonian chief digging a deeper hole

— Richard Simon

Photo: Demonstrators walk outside the Smithsonian's headquarters in Washington on Monday to protest the Smithsonian's Board of Regents meeting inside.The group is upset over Secretary G. Wayne Clough's refusal to return the David Wojnarowicz video he removed in November from the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide and Seek" exhibition. Photo credit: Alex Brandon / Associated Press.

Still reeling from the recession and its recent mounting of the complete "Ring" cycle, Los Angeles Opera is announcing Monday that its upcoming 2011-12 season will feature a lineup dominated by imported productions and revivals. The season highlights include Plácido Domingo performing the baritone role of "Simon Boccanegra" for the first time in L.A., and the company premiere of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin."

The 2011-12 season will feature six productions, with 37 total performances. A special seventh production, the 19th century Hungarian opera "Bánk bán," is in the process of being finalized and looks virtually certain for the season, according to company leaders.

Domingo, on the phone from New York, where he was rehearsing at the Metropolitan Opera, said he will conduct "Bánk bán" when it arrives in L.A., the exact dates of which will be announced later this year. He said that L.A. Opera has to be careful financially going forward, and that he would like to see the company return to as many as eight productions in the 2012-13 season.

Christopher Koelsch, the company's chief operating officer, said L.A. Opera is taking a "conservative approach" to the season and added that he is "cautiously optimistic" about the company's future.

Click here to read more about the season and continue reading below for the complete schedule being announced Monday.

If its annual gala hits its mark on March 19, the Orange County High School of the Arts figures to have close to a million reasons to be gleeful -- and grateful to its most famous graduate, Matthew Morrison, who anchors the Fox TV series “Glee” as high school glee club director Will Schuster.

Morrison, a 1997 graduate, is chairing the event at the Hyatt Regency in Irvine, which the school hopes will raise $800,000, nearly a fifth of the $5 million in annual donations it needs to augment the $9 million in state funding it gets as a public charter school. A school spokeswoman said details were still being worked out regarding Morrison's on-stage role at the gala. The black-tie evening's theme is “A Swingin’ Singin’ Salute to the Stars of the USO!” featuring more than 100 of the high school’s hoofers, belters and instrumentalists doing their best in the old entertain-the-troops tradition of Bob Hope.

In a further assist to his alma mater, Morrison has arranged to host a day on the set of “Glee” for two –- the prize of a benefit raffle, with the winning ticket to be drawn at the gala. Raffle tickets will go for $10 each.

Morrison isn’t the only successful OCHSA alum who’s doing a bit for the school, which opened in 1987 as an adjunct of Los Alamitos High School, then moved to its own campus in Santa Ana in 2000. 

Has a reasonably accomplished athlete –- someone who had at least a pretty good run as a team member or solo competitor in intercollegiate or professional sports –- ever gone on to be a reasonably acclaimed visual artist?

The question arises from USC’s announcement that its sixth annual “Artletics” exhibition will open Thursday at the Galen Center, home to the university’s men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball varsities.

The show consists of pieces made in studio art courses -- mainly ceramics, but also photography, drawings and paintings, such as "Ansel and Me" (above) by Greg Woodburn, a distance runner on the track  team. The highest-profile competitor/creators are Mitch Mustain (pictured left), the backup quarterback who started against Notre Dame during the past season, and Garrett Jackson, who sees a fair amount of action as a freshman on the basketball varsity.

The news release about the exhibition also notes that six of the 20 artists in the show have played on water polo teams that won men’s or women’s national championships (including photographer Matt Sagehorn, pictured, and ceramic sculptor Andrew Hayes, whose "Pollock, a Tea Pot," is pictured below), and another was on the women’s volleyball team that ascended to the Final Four in last year’s NCAA championships. 

The annual show of athlete-artists' work honor alumnus Louis Galen, who died in 2007 and was a major supporter of both athletics and the arts at USC, where, along with the basketball arena, the ceramics studio and a media lab at the Roski School of Fine Arts bear the Galen name (the lab is named for his wife, Helene).

But back to our question. What, if any, congruence has there been between accomplishment in  the visual arts and sports? Or, for that matter, sports and any of the arts, broadening out to music, dance, theater, architecture and film/video?

Gala celebration: The Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge made its official debut Saturday, with celebrities including Harrison Ford, Calista Flockhart, Beau Bridges and more in attendance. (Los Angeles Times)

Chaotic: Officials in Egypt say antiquities that were damaged during recent looting of the Egyptian National Museum in Cairo can be restored. (Bloomberg)

Impatient: The Toronto Star has joined the list of newspapers to have published reviews of Broadway's "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" while the much-delayed musical is still in previews. (Toronto Star)

Enigmatic: A mural seemingly inspired by Banksy's Oscar nomination for the documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop" has appeared in Los Angeles. (LAist)

One-woman show: Anna Deavere Smith's solo play "Let Me Down Easy," which tackles issues surrounding healthcare, will air on the PBS series "Great Performances." (Playbill)

Famous face: Sean Connery has been honored with a bust at the Scottish Club in Tallinn, Estonia. (Associated Press)

Desperate measures: The Louisville Orchestra is dipping into its endowment in order to pay its musicians. (Louisville Courier-Journal)

Also in the L.A. Times: Music critic Mark Swed reviews Long Beach Opera's production of "Medea"; a review of the dance ensemble "Grupo Corpo" at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

-- David Ng

Photo: The gala inauguration of the Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge on Jan. 29, 2011. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

If Long Beach Opera opened its 2011 season Saturday with a radicalized version of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” in an abandoned furniture warehouse, the EXPO Building on Atlantic Avenue, well, somebody had to do something like this sooner or later. It would be hard to think of an opera more historically important and with more impressive advocates that has so struggled to find a niche in the repertory.

The original French version, with spoken dialogue, had its premiere in Paris as “Médée” in 1797. A few years later, Beethoven modeled “Fidelio” after it. Loosely based on Euripides, Cherubini’s portrayal of the heroine who murders her two children out of revenge for an unfaithful husband, proved horrifically brutal enough to even shock Parisians in the late stages of their revolution. Yet, in one of opera history’s extraordinary ironies, Cherubini’s lavish choral scenes helped usher in sumptuous French Grand Opera.

At the other extreme, “Carmen” was stylistically another successor of “Médée.” Brahms hailed “Médée” as “the highest peak of dramatic music.” An Italian version, “Medea” (with dialogue turned into recitative), became a star vehicle for Maria Callas. She sang the role often, including at La Scala in 1953 with Leonard Bernstein conducting, and inspired other notable sopranos to briefly take up the opera.

Still, Cherubini -- an excellent craftsman but lacking a Beethovenian-sized vision and personality -- couldn’t catch on. Bernstein never conducted a note of Cherubini with the New York Philharmonic. The composer is considered a quixotic specialty of Riccardo Muti. The EMI recording of the live Callas/Bernstein performance is maybe the scariest display of a woman scorned on disc, yet it is the only major Callas opera set out of print.

Enter audacious Long Beach Opera. Andreas Mitisek, LBO’s artistic and general director, has rethought the work. He based his version on the original French “Médée,” leaving in some of the original dialogue, but also adding bits of Euripides’ “Medea” and Pierre Corneille’s 1635 play “Médée.” He and soprano Suzan Hanson, the production’s Medea, made their own colloquial singing translation into English.

The Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo raised the temperature a degree or two when it made its Dorothy Chandler Pavilion debut Friday as part of the Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center series.

The company was founded in 1975 in the interior city of Belo Horizonte by Paulo Pederneiras, who remains artistic director, set and lighting designer. Its earliest works, by the Argentine Oscar Araiz, were politically engaged, but as Brazil has become less oppressed and more democratic, the trend has been toward a general hot joie de vivre.

For better or worse, credit brother Rodrigo Pederneiras, choreographer since 1978. Emphasizing  plotless, music-based works, he has kept classical ballet as the root technique, but modified it by including abstracted national folk and social styles.

The company — whose name means “Body Group” — is very much an ensemble troupe. There are no “stars,” and none of the 19 dancers were individually highlighted in the program booklet. When any dancers emerged for short solos or duets, others usually quickly entered, picking up the same movements and repeating them in canon or in various permutations.

The effect could be numbing.

Jo Bonney, the Obie Award-winning New York-based director, will demonstrate her stagecraft next week in L.A. when playwright Neil LaBute's latest, "The Break of Noon," opens at the Geffen Playhouse.

The director, who previously helmed LaBute's "Fat Pig" at the same venue, has developed a reputation over the years as being especially adept at developing new works. Among her recent new-play productions was "American Night" by L.A.'s Culture Clash, which was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to launch its "American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle." "American Night" premiered at the Ashland, Ore., festival last summer.

In an e-mail, Culture Clash's Richard Montoya said that "you've sort of arrived as a playwright when you have director/writer work sessions with Jo in her Tribeca loft she shares with husband actor Eric Bogosian who pops in with occasional encouragements and a story or two."

Montoya continued: "Surrounded by books from Mao to Warhol one is reminded of their rock & roll theater beginnings[,] and it inspires. In the rough and tumble world of new play development and the fog of rehearsal I could always count on a gentlemanly handshake and a drink at the bar with Jo -- like a kind Richard Harris at the end of a movie -- their accents sounding similar to a Chicano ear. Our West Coast offense clashing with a more refined Manhattan Theater Club approach probably -- nevertheless -- her ear is crucial for new play development as we both endeavored as collaborators to humanize the story of a Mexican Immigrant. New productions at La Jolla and Denver prove that we did something right...."

In our Sunday profile, Bonney discusses how she first started working with Bogosian in the heady days of the early 1980s downtown Manhattan performance art scene.

RELATED

Join our live chat with playwright Neil LaBute on Feb. 2 at 1 p.m

-- Reed Johnson

Photo: Jo Bonney during rehearsal of the upcoming play "The Break of Noon," which she is directing, at the Geffen Playhouse. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

Fast-moving developments are bringing tens of thousands of anti-government protesters into Cairo's Tahrir Square, not far from the Egyptian Museum, where many of the nation's most treasured antiquities are stored. Plans have been underway for nearly 20 years to build a new museum outside the city near the site of the pyramids, partly because the overcrowded current structure -- more than 100 years old -- cannot adequately accommodate its fabled collection and partly to continue developing the cultural tourism on which the poor country's economy so heavily depends.

Conflicting reports out of Cairo, now in its fifth day of turmoil, say that either protesters or the military or both have largely secured the museum -- although in a chaotic situation such as this, the cultural treasure cannot be said to be out of the woods until the unrest finally settles. (Unconfirmed reports note damage to two mummies within the building, and CNN showed film Saturday morning of some shattered display cases.)

Baghdad's famed antiquities museum went unsecured during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and suffered considerable damage. How long the Egyptian Museum and its irreplaceable artifacts will be in danger remains to be seen.

The most famous object in the museum is of course the golden burial mask of the "Boy King," Tutankhamun. Artistically speaking, it might not be the greatest work in the collection, since Tut's brief era represented mostly a holding pattern in the long and often astounding history of Pharaonic art. But, ever since its startling discovery in the 1920s, Tut has grown in stature to become the literal face of Egypt on the world stage -- even more than the inscrutable (and crumbling) Great Sphinx of Giza, which once held that exalted position.

The process was accelerated by Egypt's government, which has shrewdly used Tut for political purposes. In 2005, when a controversial exhibition of Tut's artifacts came to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I wrote about how the Boy King had been used first as an international cultural ambassador in the 1970s and then as a representative for a new era of global corporatism. Sooner or later, expect him to be pressed into service once more. In coming months and years, after Egypt's riveting current unrest settles, it will be interesting to see how King Tut is deployed on the world stage again, as he has been in the past.

My 2005 essay on Tut's recent history can be found here.

-- Christopher Knight

Photo: Burial mask of Tutankhamun. Credit: Assocaited Press

It's Oscars season and feathers have been ruffled. While Darren Aronofsky’s ballet thriller, “Black Swan,” received five nods, terpsichorean talk has again turned to the issue of weight.

Best actress nominee Natalie Portman reportedly lost 20 pounds to sculpt a sleek body for the role, while New York City Ballet star Jenifer Ringer was called out last month by the New York Times dance critic for looking as if she’d “eaten one sugar plum too many” in a recent “Nutcracker” performance.

Ouch! The notion of body fascism -– placing a value on one’s physical appearance -– continues to rear its harsh head, more so now with the hit ballet movie drawing attention to the scale and the mirror, the double whammies that feed into the inherent narcissism of dance. Weighing in on the discussion, then, one wonders: Is it the critic’s job to judge the body or the performance?  Are they inextricably intertwined?  When does the aesthetic pronouncement become personal?

Body-critiquing in the arts is nothing new, though how the body is viewed has decidedly changed over the years.  Indeed, reactions to the packing on of pounds and other fleshly flaws can be charted back to at least the mid-18th century, when Paris Opera ballerina Marie Allard was relieved of her pointe shoes because frequent pregnancies had contributed to her excessive weight gain. 

To read my Arts & Books section essay on this hefty subject, including the notion that, to some extent, dance critics are all body fascists, click here.

-- Victoria Looseleaf

Photo: Natalie Portman in "Black Swan." Credit: Fox Searchlight.

Clearly Peter Sellars was born without a gene for conformity. The theater director's creative blood is fueled by provocation. For more than three decades, Sellars, who lives in Culver City (he used to live in Venice "but Julia Roberts moved there and it became overtaken by movie stars and so I moved inland"), has supercharged classics by Sophocles and Shakespeare, Handel and Mozart, with the political voltage of modern times. As a result, he has weathered thunderstorms of criticism.

But the innately ebullient Sellars, who this week makes his debut at the Metropolitan Opera with a new production of the John Adams opera "Nixon in China," dances in the rain of bad reviews, assured that what makes classics classic are their timeless relevance to all facets of human life, very much including politics.

In conversation for a Sunday Arts & Books profile (available here), Sellars sounds like the professor (which he is, at UCLA) who was so enrapturing and enthusiastic about the arts that he changed your young life. Some enterprising editor should compile a book called "The Quotable Peter Sellars." 

From his recent conversations with me about art and politics, here could be some entries: