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) had 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 consequence, Electrical Fields, is an album that unfolds like a fever dream, as should 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 via a singular Twenty first-century lens. You possibly can 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 delicate, droning electronics because of Chalmin’s evocative association.
Hildegard could share the album with different girls 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 beautiful thickets of rippling, nearly 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 track “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 are not precisely certain what they’ve created.
Two variations of a track by Barbara Strozzi, one other uncared for seventeenth century composer, display the old-new divide on Electrical Fields. One rendition of “Che si può fare” (What may be completed) 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 track amid its flurry of overdubbed voices and tolling pianos, culminating in a chaotic nightmare of digital results. At eight minutes lengthy, it might probably sound noodling at instances. Nonetheless, it successfully contributes to the bigger dreamscape.
The album is each ethereal and sensual because of 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 last observe, the album returns to Hildegard in a slowly-paced, hypnotic association of “O vis aeternitatis” (O power of eternity). After they speak about seeing that nice white gentle someplace between life and dying, this efficiency would make a becoming soundtrack for that unknowable journey. It ends, actually, on a excessive be aware. 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 flawed. However it turned out to be a fortunate assembly of disparate musicians who sparked just a little dreamy magic whereas connecting the previous with the brand new.
