Soprano Barbara Hannigan takes the highlight on Electrical Fields, a brand new collaborative album impressed by the Twelfth-century abbess and composer Hildegard von Bingen.
Marco Borggreve
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Marco Borggreve
Barbara Hannigan is fearless within the face of recent music. The Canadian soprano has sung the world premiere of over 100 new works, and final yr launched a recording of songs by the up to date American composer John Zorn that even she claimed (at first) have been unsingable. So it’s one thing of a shock that Hannigan’s new album is impressed by very previous music.
Alongside together with her musical companions — veteran pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque and electronics wiz and composer David Chalmin — Hannigan has fallen beneath the spell of the Twelfth century German abbess Hildegard von Bingen. The outcome, Electrical Fields, is an album that unfolds like a fever dream, as for those who’ve fallen asleep in a time machine.
Hildegard was a visionary poet, scientist, diplomat and composer. Her music, which continues to draw followers, is over 900 years previous, however Hannigan and firm view it via a singular twenty first century lens. You may hear the strategy as quickly because the album opens. “O virga mediatrix” (O department and mediator) is a mesmerizing, melismatic curtain raiser, with Hannigan’s voice drenched in reverb, backed by an artificial organ and refined, droning electronics due to Chalmin’s evocative association.
Hildegard could share the album with different ladies composers of way back, however she looms massive — even over the newly composed items. There are two recent works by The Nationwide‘s Bryce Dessner wherein the Labèque sisters provide pretty thickets of rippling, virtually minimalist sound. However Dessner’s textual content for “O orzchis Ecclesia” (O measureless Church) and “O nobilissima viriditas” (O most noble greenness) is crafted from the key language Hildegard invented for her fellow nuns.
These musicians dare to tinker with classics, unearth uncommon music and pull all of it aside. Within the music “Che t’ho fatt’io,” by seventeenth century composer Francesca Caccini (the primary girl recognized to have composed an opera), Hannigan and Chalmin shuffle melodic fragments from the unique tune with membership beats and spiky digital blips. It is a dizzying haze of Baroque magnificence wearing trippy results.
The brand new album Electrical Fields finds inspiration within the music of the 12 century abbess and composer Hildegard von Bingen.
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I love Hannigan and firm, working exterior their consolation zones, improvising with stay electronics, even in live performance. Electrical Fields took 10 years to understand, and even now the musicians say they are not precisely positive what they’ve created.
Two variations of a music by Barbara Strozzi, one other uncared for seventeenth century composer, reveal the old-new divide on Electrical Fields. One rendition of “Che si può fare” (What might be performed) is offered pretty straightforwardly, though it devolves right into a storm for 2 pianos and gurgling synths. The opposite model is an improvisation, almost unrecognizable because the music amid its flurry of overdubbed voices and tolling pianos, culminating in a chaotic nightmare of digital results. At eight minutes lengthy, it will possibly sound noodling at instances. Nonetheless, it successfully contributes to the bigger dreamscape.
The album is each ethereal and sensual due to the artistic preparations and the miracle that’s Hannigan’s voice. Even when obscured by audio remedies and mental ideas, it is nonetheless recognizable for its signature magnificence — a pure, brilliant, gleaming instrument, providing emotional depth with refined phrasing and long-breathed strains.
In its incantatory closing observe, the album returns to Hildegard in a slowly paced, hypnotic association of “O vis aeternitatis” (O pressure of eternity). After they speak about seeing that nice white mild someplace between life and dying, this efficiency would make a becoming soundtrack for that unknowable journey. It ends, actually, on a excessive notice: A 19-second-long, luscious and hovering excessive C, the likes of which solely Hannigan can ship.
Electrical Fields is an experiment that would have gone terribly fallacious. However it turned out to be a fortunate assembly of disparate musicians who sparked a bit of dreamy magic whereas connecting the previous with the brand new.