TV REVIEW : Rybczynski’s ‘Orchestra’ Video on PBS Tonight

Forget the title, at least in its usual meanings. Zbig Rybczynski’s “The Orchestra,” airing tonight on PBS’ “Great Performances” (10 p.m., Channel 28; 9 p.m., Channels 15 and 24), is not a documentary, unless it be of Rybczynski’s own visual fantasies and his prowess with multilayered, superimposed video images.

For the Greeks, however, the orchestra was the area in front of the stage used for the chorus and dancing, and the MTV-meister’s six-part video does indeed dance. There is a sense of fluid movement to the imagery, generally closely connected to the meter of the accompanying classical pops selections.

The relationship of sight and sound is sometimes obvious--complementary in the somber procession of faces recycling through the Funeral March from Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2; transformational in the chaste coupling of near-nude cruciform bodies spinning in Chartres Cathedral to Schubert’s “Ave Maria”; savagely ironic in the progressive demise of Soviet communism marching to the bourgeois epic, “Bolero.”

Other relationships seem more obscure, particularly the downbeat pageant played out on white planks suspended in blue clouds to Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor. The second movement of Mozart’s so-called “Elvira Madigan” Piano Concerto supports a mocking ode to sterile formality and conspicuous consumption, while in the Louvre, women in lingerie cavort earnestly with soldiers to Rossini’s “La Gazza Ladra” Overture.

The musical selections are not related to each other, but Rybczynski’s visuals connect each piece, most obviously in the steady cyclic procession of the large and evocative cast. His people and their costumes reflect obsessive concerns with class, sex and aging.

Parables of life, lust and death abound, in an often slick, trendy package. The visual puns and image-play can seem unduly coy as well as inventive, obfuscation for its own sake. But there is also a ready elegance and a sense of both concern and fun to Rybczynski’s virtuosic surrealism.