An Adventure for Concertgoers When Video Embellishes Sound

The next big thing in classical music concerts — adorning performances with video — has been around for a while, as so many next big things have. In the 1960's, Virgil Fox proselytized among young listeners by playing Heavy Organ concerts, offering Bach with the support of psychedelic light shows. During the last two decades, Philip Glass and his ensemble have toured widely, performing his scores for Koyaanisqatsi and other films, with the films projected above the band.

But if there is nothing new under the sun, at the moment there is a whole lot of it. On Thursday, the Eos Orchestra, an ensemble that has long used film in its performances, showed its latest adventures at Zankel Hall. Two nights before, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, Ensemble Sospeso wrapped a program of contemporary works within a cloak of trendy video. And on Sunday evening the Kronos Quartet — also no strangers to video — pulled into Zankel with a program it called Visual Music.

The Kronos and Ensemble Sospeso each played 10 works, and they offered their programs as unified productions... Ensemble Sospeso's concert, Sospeso Xponential, was ambitious and quirky... The works were drawn largely from the current A-list of European modernists, including Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, Gyorgy Ligeti, Harrison Birtwistle, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Magnus Lindberg. The ensemble's co-directors, Kirk Noreen and Joshua Cody, had works on the program as well. A connective video production, directed by Jeff Sugg, included a projection of each work's title (but not its composer's name), followed by a definition of the title's principal image. For most of the works, digitally altered live video (by Robert Weiss) projected the performers, many times larger than life.

These images showed the ensemble's musicians to be spectacular actors. Even while playing works that involved little more than the sound of a bow slowly scraping on a cello string, at great length, as in Mr. Lachenmann's Pression (1970), or the alternation of heavy breathing and bursts of accordion figuration, as in Mr. Noreen's Magician (2003), the players looked interested and involved. Things began to look up with Mr. Lindberg's Ablauf (1983-86), a vibrant, virtuosic work for clarinet, punctuated by fortissimo percussion bursts...

There were also a few ambitious video productions, the best of which was The Kiss (2003), a cohesive drama about a transcontinental romance, with an alluring score by Mr. Cody, the ensemble's co-director, for soprano, violin, electronic sound.

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