Sarah Kirkland Snider Never Sleep Like That Again
Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum kicked off its innovative series of new song works curated by advanced impresario Beth Morrison last Thursday with a packed house for Sarah Kirkland Snider's moody, evocative vocal bicycle Penelope. Morrison began planning advanced performances in the jewel-box shaped Calderwood Hall this summer every bit office of what the Earth chosen "a significant enhancement of its offerings in gimmicky music and performance art." This yr'south serial of events includes Penelope, Paolo Prestini's Labyrinth concerto installation on Feb. 4th, and a semi-staged version of MIT composer Keeril Makan'south new opera Persona.
Premiered on February 1, 2008 at the Getty Villa in Malibu and issued by New Amsterdam Records (where the composer is a co-Director) in 2010, Penelope is a kind of multimedia cabaret piece which has been acclaimed equally a landmark combination of art song and indie stone, making many "Peak 10" lists for all-time classical, "genre-defying," and "culling art song" albums. The piece of work is a unique hybrid of classical and pop styles, interpreting fourteen dreamlike poetic sections through voice communication, murmur, and song.
The current song cycle originated as a much simpler music-theater monodrama for alto/role player (premiered by the librettist Ellen McLaughlin) and the Eclipse (string) Quartet; it was deputed by the J. Paul Getty Center in 2007. The title role (a woman evoking the classical Penelope) has been typically interpreted by singer Shara Worden, for whom the original orchestration and audio design was expanded in 2009 through a collaboration with programmer Michael Hammond on sound design.
Worden and the advanced bedchamber ensemble Signal, under the management of acclaimed usher Brad Lubman, recorded this expanded version of Penelope with producer Lawson White Nov 3-vi, 2009, at Clinton Studios in New York, NY; the production has been produced oft (as many equally eight times per year) with a multifariousness of orchestral groups from New York's Merkin Concert Hall, Poisson Rouge, and The Kitchen to Portland, Oregon.
Carla Kihlstedt, co-founder of the alternative stone band Rabbit Rabbit, provided the vocal firepower necessary for the Gardner'due south stylistically various tour-de-force. Trained at Oberlin and the San Francisco and Peabody Conservatories, her work ranges from jazz and avant-garde progressive rock performances on violin, electric violin, and Stroh violin to vocal projects with Tom Waits and Fred Firth. Kihlstedt is a founding fellow member of the quintet, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum,a past member of Tin Hat, and (along with her hubby, Matthias Bossi) has recently launched an online subscription serial for new works, Rabbit Rabbit Radio.
Entering Calderwood Hall tin can feel similar walking into a huge Rubik's Cube. During the operation, the business firm lights were out, assuasive the mostly-white surfaces (including the undersides of the stacked balconies that completely surroundings the intimate space) to undulate with irresolute colors. Bailey Costa's lighting design oozed through brilliant solid colors for each of the movements, and Murat Eyuboglu's video images (projected behind the ensemble) helped to strengthen the dramatic flavor by acting as metaphorical guideposts. Since half of the audience was seated in and nether layered balconies, we were embraced by the innovative sound and lighting pattern, merely were totally unable to consult notes, titles, or texts in the program. Run across BMInt'south detailed overview of acoustics and design of the hall here.
Well-balanced, robust sound from the instruments and electronic elements obscured Penelope's dream-like narrative. Sarah Snider requires her soloist exist a song chameleon, interpreting the poetry without whimsy and contrasting forceful and vulnerable tones throughout. The vocal part combined clear, attractive melodic sections with recitation, whispering, and moans, but was virtually notable for the way the voice acted equally an extension of the string timbre. Spoken and whispered texts were enhanced through the use of close miking and special processing techniques (including distortion and fuzztone on the song mike), and the orchestration was generally transparent and intimate.
Since Penelope's 14 songs are not conspicuously delineated by stiff cadences and silence, each motility propelled gently into the next, washing over the states in waves, rather than telling fourteen parts of a coherent story. Songs appeared to be deliberately constructed with aural references to cabaret, sleeping accommodation popular, art pop, and opera, but failed to establish the mounting dramatic shape of 20th-century song cycles such every bit Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire on Maxwell Davies'south Viii Songs for a Mad King.
For the first tertiary of the work, Kihlstedt's phonation composite seamlessly with the strings, adding flashes of color and timbre but not communicating a clear narrative intent. The concert was engineered by Ryan Ainsworth, who choose levels and mixes of sounds advisable to a pop performance (where the elements were balanced to have roughly the same punch), rather than a classical performance (where contrapuntal details and text would take been more than clear). As we moved through the hr-long soundscape, some songs recalled the best 1980s work of Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk, whereas others showed Snider's adoration for 1990s culling (indie rock) confessional female vocaliser-songwriters like Liz Phair and PJ Harvey.
The virtuosity inherent in Penelope's subtle orchestration was masterfully interpreted past the Firebird Ensemble, directed by Jeffrey Means. The group played with energy, virtuosity, and passion, weaving their way through a score that showcases elements of Stravinskyan chamber music (à la The Soldier's Tale), the gloom of Gothic rock, and some of the Velvet Clandestine'due south "melancholy noise."
The big string-dominated classical chamber sound was enhanced with rock drumset (both Assistant Manager Aaron Trant and William Manly on percussion), musique concrète, placidity but sometimes-distorted electric guitar played past guest Taylor Levine, and industrial noise. Founding director Kate Vincent (on viola) and cellist Jacques Wood soared through melancholy obbligato melodies, and Rane Moore's dark, resonant clarinet tone evoked a foreboding, sorrowful soundscape.
Snider wields voice and instruments like a flexible ready of industrial tools, each fulfilling a single function in the delineation of an abstract, tormented conversation. Trios and quartets felt at in one case micro-orchestrated and passionately spontaneous, and at the work'due south best, I was reminded of David Bowie's fantastic, morbid score for the haunting 1982 film True cat People.
Librettist, playwright, and actor Ellen McLaughlin (1957-) jams a lot of big ideas into fourteen intimate lyrics. Well-known to American audiences as the original "Angel" in Tony Kushner'due south Angels in America, McLaughlin is an award-winning playwright who successfully reinterprets the universal truths establish in aboriginal Greek drama through a feminist lens. Her interest in Greek tropes has resulted in numerous plays that reinterpret classical characters through mod lenses. Some of her recent work has garnered acclaim in Boston (Ajax in Republic of iraq, produced at ART in 2008; Iphigenia and Other Daughters at BU, 2013), and since joining the Barnard faculty in 1995, several plays have taken New York past storm (The Trojan Women, Helen, The Persians, Oedipus, and The Greek Plays).
Inspired by The Odyssey, Ellen McLaughlin developed 14 related texts to draw a woman whose husband returns dwelling (I. I have a business firm/Looks out to bounding main/And this is where he came/The stranger with the face of a man I loved) from an unnamed war after an absenteeism of xx years. Since he doesn't know who he is, she finds a way into her husband'southward memory (Two. Endeavour to call up/This is what you once were like/Where is it you lot've gone?/How tin I find y'all? ) by reading Homer's Odyssey. Her meditation on "memory, identity, and what it means to come dwelling" echoes Penelope's classical quest for the restoration of her hubby (V. Just have my hand, Stranger/Just take my hand/And I will lead you home.).
The lyrics are alternately intimate and dramatic, and movement titles include references to the events of the Odyssey itself (Iii. The Honeyed Fruit and IV. The Lotus Eaters) and to characters that have shaped the soldier'south memories (Calypso, Teresias, and Helios). McLaughlin explores the hubby'south loss of identity (III. "Those who tasted it fell where they were, dreaming, their faces smeared smile with the sweetness of the end of any desire for home.") and the wife's quest to restore it (VI. "Never volition I sleep like that, sleep like that/And I'm lost in this night/I'm already lost, merely not as lost every bit them/my sleeping, drooling, smiling men.) Other moments deal directly with regret and loss (VII. One twenty-four hours my hollow center cracked to pulverization like an old egg and I roughshod where I stood, optics still clinging to the empty horizon.), developing an atmospheric, dirge-like rhythm through repetition.
The most poignant and emotionally wrenching poem lies at the center of Penelope in the sixth movement (Circe and the Hanged Man): the adult female speaking/singing has fabricated it halfway to the possible resolution she seeks, just similar the musicians, we remain suspended in fourth dimension and space: "Accept yous ever noticed that/Between the business organisation of its going up/and the business organization of its autumn/it hesitates?/It just waits…"
The terminal song gives the states some relief from longing and nostalgia by taking apart the narrative search itself:
"Information technology moves like a live thing in his hands
The story, his story
Bloody and sacred, truth and lie…
And it tells itself,
the pages turn and tell themselves,
Backwards and forwards like the tide."
Looking Ahead:
Ii months ago, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider released a follow-up to Penelope in the form of a 13-move song bicycle, premiered at the 2013 Ecstatic Music Festival in Merkin Hall. The album is a studio recording of her collaboration with New England poet and illustrator Nathaniel Bellows entitled Unremembered. In Nov, the Globe printed an exploration of Snider'due south standing success and compositional influences.
Beth Morrison' collaboration with the Gardner continues with Labyrinth on Feb 4th and Stir: on May 5th. Next year she presents at Emerson with a September 2016 cycle of 3 contemporary operas entitled The Ouruboros Trilogy, conceived by Ruby-red Lim Jacobs. These full-length works include Scott Wheeler'south Naga, Paola Prestini's Gilgamesh, and Zhou Long's 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning Madame White Snake (premiered by Opera Boston in 2010). The three operas will exist presented both individually and as part of seven hr full-day events.
A longtime abet of new music, Prichard is a regular pre-opera speaker for the San Francisco Opera and Boston Baroque. She has taught courses on music and theater history at Northeastern University and UMass-Lowell.
Source: https://www.classical-scene.com/2015/12/09/penelope-morrison-isgm/
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