A Dingy Road Glorified in Music and Cinema
By JON PARELES

The subject of “The BQE,” the self-described “cinematic suite” that had its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, is an epitome of New York City grime. Sufjan Stevens, the composer, said onstage that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is “one of the world’s ugliest expressways.” But his treatment channeled Hollywood glamour, with three screens of images, a soundtrack of lush, triumphal orchestral fanfares and a chorus line of five people twirling Hula-Hoops.

Mr. Stevens has emerged from indie rock as a mastermind of extravaganzas, and all the better if they’re laced with fond irony. Even without big budgets, he has put costumed performers onstage and mini-orchestras on his albums. The commission from the Brooklyn Academy of Music allowed Mr. Stevens to think bigger, and he exploited it superbly, scoring the half-hour instrumental suite of “The BQE” for three dozen musicians and then deploying them for new, full-blown versions of his enigmatic songs. Mr. Stevens uses swirling, glimmering Romantic orchestration (by way of soundtracks and 1950s pop) to make his private ruminations more quizzical and more alluring at the same time.

“The BQE” is Mr. Stevens’s equivalent of the Godfrey Reggio-Philip Glass film collaboration “Koyaanisqatsi”: a skeptical view of development that eventually falls in love with sheer motion. The images, shot on 8-millimeter and 16-millimeter film by Mr. Stevens with the cinematographer Reuben Kleiner, started out contemplating Brooklyn’s buildings and streetscapes, in stillness and barely moving traffic congestion. Then they gathered speed, changing from three clogged lanes by day to streaking headlights at night. The Hula-Hoopers, doing synchronized routines, were there for amusement and for additional rotary motion; they ended up spinning lighted hoops against a background of carnival rides.

Like a movie score, the music for “The BQE” depended more on texture and gesture than on melody. There were contemplative piano interludes touched by Gershwin and Debussy, stately Aaron Copland chords, busily twittering woodwinds, twinkling music-box-like interludes and motoric arpeggios by way of Mr. Glass, and vertiginous waltzes and sustained chaotic tremolos out of “A Day in the Life.” Designed to work as a backdrop, the music touched even the dingiest images with wonderment.

But the set of songs was even better. As he sang about cars and industrialization in “Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!),” revelations in “Seven Swans,” sociopathic thoughts in “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” and lost love in “Chicago,” the music grew newly expansive, with its interludes extended to revel in the forces he had available, and with its orchestrations filled out but never overblown. In songs about historical figures and individual oddballs, with settings that could be transparent or sumptuous, Mr. Stevens was portraying an America full of vulnerable dreamers, and sometimes crackpots, while his music fleshed out those dreams in cinematic splendor.

“Is it mysterious? Is it something ripe and sweet?” he sang in “Majesty Snowbird.” It was - an extravaganza with plenty left unexplained.

Sufjan Stevens performs tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100; bam.org. The show is sold out.