By Néstor CASTIGLIONE

The age of automation is upon us – or so an endless array of utopian technological theologians and despairing neo-Luddites would have us believe. They say that the storm is coming and coming at us fast; a deluge of epochal proportions that will sweep away millenia-old concepts of “work” and may possibly still ¬– once and for all – the very need for any creation by human hands. Perhaps, too, musical performance will be swept away by the technological singularity with future generations finding the connections between Fauré and Firefox, Lutosławski and Linux not so unlikely.

But if such a future will ever be realized – and when have the prognosticators of hope or doom ever seen their visions fulfilled exactly as they had foreseen? – humanity can find comfort in knowing that no automaton will ever inspire the awe of man struggling to transcend and trounce the limitations of the body. No algorithm will ever equal the feat of will that the 24-year-old Jean Barraqué accomplished in composing his “Piano Sonata,” a score that so powerfully established the composer’s mature idiom that he set fire to the entirety of his output that had preceded it. Nor will they ever equal Steven Vanhauwaert’s achievement last Saturday in scaling this towering Everest of the piano.

The work was the conclusion of a vibrant Jacaranda Music program entitled “Mental Energy,” though Vanhauwaert’s performance was as much a feat of physical energy.

Barraqué’s “Piano Sonata” is a combustible mix of Bach, late Beethoven, and even Liszt fused with the composer’s own highly expressive serial idiom. Vanhauwaert revealed and revelled in all those facets, allowing his hands, which the composer had tasked to their utmost, to reveal the humanity and vulnerability at the heart of this score.

Certainly the work is a marvel of thematic logic and progression, of the myriad developments of Barraqué’s idiosyncratic use of tone rows. But what Vanhauwaert imprinted most deeply in the listener’s mind was the almost plaintive utopianism that set alight the pioneers of serial music. Far from wanting to alienate their audiences, these composers sought to engage audiences while making them question the boundaries of what is possible in sound. Yet it also expressed, after a decade of global warfare that left much of Europe in ashes, the hope that a new music in a global language could knock down the barriers that had previously sown distrust and even hate; an idiom which could potentially be intelligible to any listener, whether they were in Paris, Pasadena or Pyongyang. It was this duality of architectural logic and universal expressivity that animated Vanhauwaert’s staggering performance, one in which careful preparation bore fruit in playing that was translucent and almost improvisatory.

His performance of Messiaen’s “Quatre études de rythme,” which preceded the Barraqué, whet the ear for the main course that was to come, Vanhauwaert’s fingers setting the fuse for phosphorescent explosions that shimmered against a the backdrop of a tropical night.

No less impressive was the performance of “Psappha” by Barraqué’s fellow Messiaen pupil Iannis Xenakis. For all the sophisticated techniques that the composer would utilize to compose his works – game theory, set theory, stochastic processes –the result was surprisingly primal and urgent. This near visceral quality was superbly realized by percussionist Jonathan Hepfer, whose performance had an elemental power that could very well have brought down the walls of the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica where the concert took place.

The concert also spoke to the work of another person who appeared neither on stage nor on the program as composer. That was Patrick Scott, artistic and executive director of Jacaranda Music, whose vision and daring made this program possible, a feat made all the more remarkable by the wide disdain the word “serial” or “atonal” evokes in more timid listeners. Perhaps a computer program in some concert series in the deep future would weed such music out, its algorithms discerning that its patrons would prefer the comfortable and soporific. But Jacaranda Music and its “Mental Energy” program demonstrated that the possibilities of humanity, far from being exhausted, may have its best years ahead yet.

  Nestor CASTIGLIONE