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 latest music. The Canadian soprano has sung the world premiere of over 100 new works, and final yr launched a recording of songs by the modern 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 below 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 in the event you’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 by means of a singular twenty first century lens. You possibly can hear the method 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 delicate, droning electronics due to Chalmin’s evocative association.
Hildegard could share the album with different girls composers of way back, however she looms giant — even over the newly composed items. There are two contemporary works by The Nationwide‘s Bryce Dessner through which the Labèque sisters provide beautiful 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 tune “Che t’ho fatt’io,” by seventeenth century composer Francesca Caccini (the primary girl identified 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 like Hannigan and firm, working outdoors their consolation zones, improvising with stay electronics, even in live performance. Electrical Fields took 10 years to appreciate, and even now the musicians say they don’t seem to be precisely certain what they’ve created.
Two variations of a tune by Barbara Strozzi, one other uncared for seventeenth century composer, show the old-new divide on Electrical Fields. One rendition of “Che si può fare” (What could be completed) is introduced pretty straightforwardly, though it devolves right into a storm for 2 pianos and gurgling synths. The opposite model is an improvisation, practically unrecognizable because the tune amid its flurry of overdubbed voices and tolling pianos, culminating in a chaotic nightmare of digital results. At eight minutes lengthy, it may possibly sound noodling at instances. Nonetheless, it successfully contributes to the bigger dreamscape.
The album is each ethereal and sensual due to the inventive preparations and the miracle that’s Hannigan’s voice. Even when obscured by audio therapies and mental ideas, it is nonetheless recognizable for its signature magnificence — a pure, shiny, gleaming instrument, providing emotional depth with refined phrasing and long-breathed strains.
In its incantatory remaining observe, the album returns to Hildegard in a slowly paced, hypnotic association of “O vis aeternitatis” (O power of eternity). Once they speak about seeing that nice white mild someplace between life and loss of life, this efficiency would make a becoming soundtrack for that unknowable journey. It ends, actually, on a excessive observe: A 19-second-long, luscious and hovering excessive C, the likes of which solely Hannigan can ship.
Electrical Fields is an experiment that might have gone terribly incorrect. But it surely turned out to be a fortunate assembly of disparate musicians who sparked a little bit dreamy magic whereas connecting the previous with the brand new.
