SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Sheldon Frank, Luciano Berio and David Lang:  Theatre of Voices, Paul Hillier (director), Zankel Hall, 25.10. 2007 (BH)

Sheldon Frank: “As I Was Saying” (1978)
Luciano Berio: A-Ronne (1975)
David Lang: the little match girl passion (2007) (World premiere)

Vocal work this brilliant doesn’t come around that often, and the empty seats were dispiriting: Zankel Hall might have been half-full.  But those who attended got to watch three widely varying examples of vocal repertoire, polished to a high gloss by one of the best groups in the world, Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices.  Hillier himself began the program with a short solo, As I Was Saying  by Sheldon Frank, a writer living in New Jersey.  Frank’s inspiration is based on clichés—sentences uttered casually without thinking—arranged in repetitive patterns.  If the origin seems not too distant from Steve Reich’s vocal experiments like Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain, Frank seems more interested in a casual eavesdropping on conversation we take for granted and appropriating it, John Cage-style.  In any case, Hillier’s deadpan delivery of lines like the following produced grins and laughs:

I said that’s what I meant, that’s what I said, that’s what I meant, that’s what I said, that’s what I said, well…

Luciano Berio’s A-Ronne was originally conceived for radio, and might be characterized as a deconstruction of a poem by Edoardo Sanguineti, repeated some 20 times during the course of the piece.  It is a veritable catalog of sounds: cooing, yelling, whistling, coughing, sobbing, stuttering, and speaking, with the occasional musical note.  Words are fragmented into syllables or even smaller units, tossed into the air, torn in pieces, left to glisten, left to dry.  Occasionally the singers pinch their noses to produce a cartoon chorus.  There must be very few groups anywhere who can tackle this music and make sense out of it, but Hillier, along with Bente Vist, Miriam Andersén, Christopher Watson, and Jakob Bloch Jespersen did just that.

With uncommon grace, David Lang has added one of his best works to the canon, the little match girl passion, his reworking of a classic Hans Christian Andersen tale.  Each of the fifteen sections uses a combination of vocalist and one percussion instrument such as chimes or xylophone, and several sections combine the entire group.  Lang takes the basic rhythm of people offering prayers and adds pauses, often with the sparest instrumental accompaniment, and adds subtle explorations of timbres and phrasing.  Sometimes a mere shift in voicing is the sole change in the texture.  As the half-hour progresses, the gentleness becomes more piercing.  We empathize with the girl’s tragic demise, and the somber music is always reverent, as if hesitant to intrude on some intimate feelings.

The unearthly delicacy rendered by Hillier and his fabulous group was astonishing.  Although completely unlike the Berio, Lang shares a meticulous attention to the tiniest details, which the ensemble delivered as if they were training us on the spot to be more acute in our hearing. 

Bruce Hodges

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