The BQE, Sufjan Stevens' multimedia work celebrating the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, premiered in 2007 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Onstage, it was an audiovisual three-ring circus, with 16-millimeter video screening images of the roadway while costumed female hula hoopers gyrated in the foreground. Now, he has packaged the experience in a boxed set, complete with an essay in the liner notes, the DVD, a comic book, and a View-Master reel. On one hand, this is exactly the sort of quixotically huge undertaking Stevens has a weakness for. And yet, once you strip away the bells and whistles, The BQE is essentially a traditional 40-minute orchestral suite, a lightweight showpiece in which the ghosts of Gershwin, Ravel, Respighi, and other standard-orchestra-repertoire crowd-pleasers surface. In fact, until an electronic interlude crashes in about halfway through, The BQE could easily pass for the sort of palette-cleanser that might have opened a major orchestra's subscription concert in the 1950s.
The fact that Stevens would devote his energy to something as unwieldy and time-consuming as an old-fashioned orchestral suite while his fans wait patiently for an Illinois followup is perversely endearing, like learning that J.J. Abrams has put the final season of "Lost" on hold so he can realize his dream of reciting The Iliad. But luckily, The BQE isn't much in need of the polar-bear-on-tricycle-style praise that greeted Elvis Costello when critics learned that he wrote his Il Sogno ballet suite by hand: "Look, it's a pop musician, and he's composing!" The BQE is a bubbly, fun, fast-paced, and deftly written piece, full of compositional fireworks, jazzy interludes, and stylistic detours.
It opens in full faux-pompous mode, trumpets blaring and woodwinds fluttering, before dissolving into a languid Romantic episode, the pillowy string writing and dewy, twinkling piano recalling Rachmaninov at his drowsiest. From there, Stevens flits through a dozen different moods and textures, a rustling-leaves pizzicato section collapsing directly into a kaleidoscopic, double-time electronic version of itself. The variations come and go breathlessly, each folding into the next without much attempt to locate the connective tissue linking them. The effect is superficial, but pleasantly bracing, like flipping quickly through the pages of a book.
The accompanying DVD, which Stevens shot himself alongside cinematographer Reuben Kleiner, is supposed to drive home the connection the work has with this project's famously clogged namesake. However, instead of animating or complementing the bustling music, the visuals bog down the project. The split-screen shots of the highway have a very staid, Ken Burns quality to them, and feel as though they could have been produced completely independently of Stevens' music. If Stevens was setting out to evoke the odd exhilaration of urban chaos-- and he seems to have been, rhapsodizing in the liner notes about the roadway's "steep grades, sharp turns, [and] detours... [creating] a rollercoaster obstacle course for the unsuspecting driver"-- then it's ironic that the video he's produced is completely devoid of kinetic energy. Long, motionless shots of the congestion on the BQE don't give you much of a fresh perspective on traffic; they mostly feel like, well, sitting in actual traffic. When the sun sets and we're invited to gaze upon lit-up city skylines and red suns, it's a relief, mainly because we're no longer stuck in gridlock.
As with Run Rabbit Run, Osso's recent string-quartet reworking of Stevens' second album, Enjoy Your Rabbit, it's tough to know for whom The BQE project is intended. It seems doubtful that the work will find a second life in orchestral programs, and it feels equally unlikely that fans of any of his previous albums will be clamoring to hear this work live. As such, The BQE is probably best classified as an unusually successful vanity project, as well as evidence of Stevens' restless creativity. However, even at the close of the Brooklyn Academy of Music premiere, Stevens came out to sing some songs; one hopes that he gets back to singing and writing some more of those soon enough.
