Minnesota composer goes pop! wham! boom! with comics-inspired concert

Classical music is getting complicated. At a typical Schubert Club recital, you might have a soloist or two, plus a pianist.

On Thursday evening at the TPT Street Space in St. Paul, it was all hands on deck — and then some.

Stage right sat a piano, a string quintet and a narrator. Stage left were three singers, with a large screen for projections in between.

A phalanx of mixing desks and monitors controlled sound and vision, and a set of four black speakers stood sentinel quadraphonically in the room's corners.

It was all done in the name of Twin Cities composer Libby Larsen, whose music was showcased at the recital.

Three of Larsen's works were accompanied by cartoon projections, with Larsen's music acting as a kind of running commentary.

The eeriest of these was "The Peculiar Case of H.H. Holmes," based on a 19th-century serial killer who may have murdered 250 victims in Chicago.

It was a strangely unsettling experience. Engebreth, singing without a score, deftly walked a tightrope between light parody and flickering insights into the dastardly mind-set of the villain.

Larsen's music took a similar path, probing the darker corners of Holmes' psyche yet flipping at one point into a Victorian waltz pastiche that might have made W.S. Gilbert proud.

The other two cartoon-inspired pieces were lighter in tone, more explicitly laced with wit and musical nostalgia.

"The Fantom of the Fair," based on a 1939 prototypical Spider-Man comic strip, drew a particularly feisty performance from mezzo-soprano Christina Baldwin, voicing a variety of characters.

The color illustrations, from Paul Gustavson's originals, were neatly cut and sequenced by visual designer Toni Lindgren to match the unraveling of Larsen's musical setting.

This time Larsen's music mined the idiom of late-night jazz noir. Baldwin coiled herself enthusiastically around snippets of a slinky torch song, the first and possibly last to incorporate the Trumpian coinage "stable genius" in its lyrics.

Tenor Paul Phoenix played the suitor, popping up again in the concert's finale, a piece titled "O Magnum Mysterium."

Its combination of live and electronically recycled vocals swirled and hovered in a ghostly fashion, perhaps in restless homage to a more innocent era when comic-book characters could save a fearful world from immolation.

Between the cartoon pieces, players from the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra performed movements from another Larsen work, the Bach-inspired "Evening in the Palace of Reason."

Serendipitously their jaggy rhythms and mood of rumination fit the cartoon mini-operas perfectly, framing an hour of entertainment rich in novelty and musical imagination.