"Equal parts opera, avant-garde, art installation and phantasmagoria, the result, if you can handle it, is a jaw-dropping, perplexing, exciting, fun, challenging, exasperating, noteworthy, and exciting theatrical experience the likes of which you may never see again."
Tony Frankel, Stage and Cinema, 2012
Read More“More "Eraserhead" than "Ernani" in its visceral impact, the world premiere of composer Anne LeBaron’s challenging, discordant "Crescent City" introduces Los Angeles to its brand new opera company The Industry this month in Atwater Village.”
Read More“The bleeding edge of modern theatrical performance art. LeBaron has cooked up a complex, exotic, polyrhythmic gumbo of sound. The images are indelible, and it is a production you will not soon forget…Preservation Hall on acid.”
Read More“LeBaron's score includes a complex of styles. There is the Cajun and Creole music, the jazz and zydeco from her native New Orleans, which LeBaron layers to create atmosphere. She is fluent in grandly operatic manner and in the language of avant-garde. A lot can happen at once, or she can focus very simply on the moment. This too is a perspective that is always changing, and always captivating.”
Read More“As unorthodox as the story line, music and sets are, the relationship of the audience to "Crescent City" itself may be even stranger. Audiences can view the work from beanbag chairs in the set's approximation of a dive bar, from what Sharon jokingly calls a skybox set over the action, or while walking along a pedestrian area along the edge of the stage. The latter option, he says, "allows you to look at it from the perspective of performance art or a gallery," with a shifting point of view and accidental connection with other audience members.”
Read More“Anne LeBaron’s Irona (the Housewife) translated the soap operas and household chores defining Irona’s daily existence into a musical language that successfully combines electronic pop elements and repetitive patterns into the trash aesthetic of television.”
Read More“Anne LeBaron thoroughly studied the musical culture of our country and, based on it, has composed her own work. Dramatic action unfolds in three languages -Kazakh, Russian and English. The silence of the great Steppes and the memory of that silence - is golden.”
Vera Lyahovskaya, Izvestiya, 2012
Read More“The artist inhabits her massive instrument as if it were a continent; she fords its rivers of strings and discovers new worlds in the crevices of tonality… nervous and hoarse and brilliant. LeBaron is a true “stratigrapher” in her layering of material, where new vistas seem to unfold endlessly behind others.”
The New York City Jazz Record, 2011
Read MoreLe Baron’s Solar Music was mesmerizing. The composer was in attendance, and in her remarks said that the pre-existing title was apropos to the dynamic of her work although was chosen post-hoc to its composition. The reference is to Mexican surrealist painter Remedios Varo’s work with “a woman standing in a dying forest, bowing rays of the sun.”
Read More“The vacuum cleaner here is an unusually responsive model with a long hose and electronic sensors that sonically interact with a singer's every squeal of delight. But the interaction between acoustic and electronic music -- and between traditional vocal sounds, nontraditional vocal sounds and all those transformative auditory sensors -- is where the interest lies.”
Read More“LeBaron's writing for the instrumental ensemble is full of invention, sometimes avant-garde and sometimes not. Cultures never collide, but many coexist. Her fluidity with musical style and with musical character is the real wetness of "Wet." The instruments offer watery unpredictability and readily take the shape of any container (or musical form).”
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