Commentary: Bill Viola was our greatest video artist, but he couldn’t have done it without sound

On a stormy, steamy summer day in 2003, as I approached the Gasometer Oberhausen, which the Third Reich used for fuel storage, I expected the enormous cylindrical structure would prove the gloomiest building in Germany. I entered only because Bill Viola’s epic “Five Angels for the Millennium” was projected on five astonishing screens installed as high as 200 feet. For me, Viola’s most memorable achievement came the year after Oberhausen at Walt Disney Concert Hall with “The Tristan Project” in 2004. It was an enormous undertaking, a performance of Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde” at the then-new Frank Gehry hall, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, staging by Peter Sellars and video by Viola on a massive, newly developed, high-definition screen. In 1999, Sellars curated an L.A. Phil concert at the Hollywood Bowl that included Salonen conducting Edgard Varèse’s “Déserts,” with video by Viola.