Nothing Proved: New Works for Viols, Voice, and Electronics
Hildegard von BINGEN (1098-1179)
Alleluia, O Virga Mediatrix (1150) [3:27)
Frances WHITE (b.1960)
A Flower on the Farther Side (2010) [15:20)
Kristin NORDERVAL (b.1957)
Nothing Proved Can Be (2008) [24:17]
Tawnie OLSON (b.1974)
Thorns (2013) [7:53]
Frances WHITE
From A Fairy Tale (2013) [14:03]
Kristen Norderval (soprano), Dashon Burton (bass-baritone), Valeria Vasilevski (narrator), Parthenia
Sung texts provided.
rec. 2016/2017, Westchester Studios, Westchester, USA
MSR CLASSICS MS1635 [64:48]
If your knowledge of the work of Parthenia is limited to CDs such as The Flaming Fire: Mary Queen of Scots and Her World (MS 1490) or As It Fell on A Holie Eve: Music for an Elizabethan Christmas (MS 1365) don’t rush to buy this new disc before reading further. On The Flaming Fire they played music by, amongst others, William Byrd and Anthony Holborne and they were joined by countertenor (and tenor) Ryland Angel, with Dongsok Shik playing the virginal. On As It Fell there is music by John Bull, Thomas Morley and other Elizabethans, and the viol consort is joined by soprano Julianne Baird. Here, on Nothing Proved, the music is by three contemporary composers and – with a difference – by Hildegard von Bingen. Of the three contemporary composers, Frances White is best known as a composer of electronic music, while Kristin Norderval, in the words of her website, combines “her operatic lineage with electronic experimentation”. Canadian Tawnie Olson writes music for conventional instruments.
For me the two most attractive works are Frances White’s From A Fairy Tale and Kristin Norderval’s Nothing Proved Can Be. From A Fairy Tale begins with Valeria Vasilevski narrating, in a magically hushed voice, a ‘fragment’ of a fairy story, about a lonely girl, served by nearly-invisible servants, who has access to books that tell stories of “fantastic lands” or of “common peasants” – both of them subjects of which she has no experience. She also hears music “played by unknown musicians who appeared and disappeared”. There is also a beautiful garden she can sit in. One day, as she rests on a bench underneath a tree a small bird sits by her. It has a beautiful voice and it reappears day after day, singing “ethereal notes”. She began to speak to the bird and the two “fell in love”. At this point the words stop and the viols and electronic music take over, inviting/stimulating us to imagine the rest of the story. The sound of the viols, inevitably archaic for us, however much we love the viol music of the Renaissance, is oddly blended with White’s ‘modern’ electronic music to create a timeless effect, or at any rate a world, like that of all true fairy stories where the normal laws of time don’t apply. The music ranges across diverse emotional territories, and I suspect that every listener will imagine a different narrative. This is a splendidly magical and beautiful piece. The initial ‘story’ is the work of James Pritchett, author of The Music of John Cage, published by Cambridge University Press in 1996.
Kristin Norderval is the soprano soloist on her own Nothing Proven Can Be, “for viol quartet, soprano, and interactive audio processing”. It sets texts taken from four of the surviving poems attributed to Queen Elizabeth I, the four poems being ‘On the Execution of Lord High Admiral Thomas Seymour’, ‘The Doubt of Future Foes’, ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’ (“Grieve and Dare Not”) and ‘Poem Written on a Wall at Woodstock’ (“Oh Fortune, thy wresting, wavering state”). The piece’s title is taken from the last of these poems: “Much suspected by me/Nothing proved can be/Quoth Elizabeth, prisoner”. The sequence becomes a study in the precariousness of power, of, in a sense, the illusory nature of power when the supposed possessor of power has ceaselessly to fear both the blows of Fortune and the acts of enemies who are often well disguised as powers. A subtext seems to be that such difficulties and fears are much compounded when, like Elizabeth, the one ‘in power’ is a woman in what was a predominantly male world. Norderval’s vocal approach is essentially operatic and her singing is powerfully emotional. The consort of viols grounds the work – and its subject – in the sixteenth century, while the processed and amplified sound of the viols universalizes, and modernizes, the work’s relevance. Reviewing a concert performance of the work in The New Yorker (April 29, 2013) Alex Ross wrote: “Kristin Norderval sang her song cycle ‘Nothing Proved’ […] Although it was a concert piece, it felt like an opera in the making, conjuring in tensely shimmering, computer-enhanced textures the lofty isolation of the subject.” Nothing Proved Can Be, with its treatment of a ‘powerful’ women surrounded by whispering conspirators, is a disturbing piece which yet has a kind of ruthlessly clear-eyed beauty.
There are no electronic sounds or computer enhanced textures in Tawnie Olson’s Thorns, which is performed by the four viols of Parthenia and the bass-baritone Dashon Burton. Thorns is a setting of a poem by John Hare, a poet of whom I have no knowledge, though I would hazard a guess that perhaps he is Canadian, like Olson). The text of the poem is printed in the CD booklet. In two five- line stanzas, it is religious lyric which get most of its power from the comparison of Adam and Christ set up in the opening two lines of each stanza. The first stanza opens thus: “The earth first fouled his work with thorns/when Adam fell”, while the second opens, in parallel fashion, like this: “The thorns were wound around his head/When Jesus died”. The first stanza continues with imagery of winter, the second with images of spring. The contrast is a simple one, and Olson exploits it well, musically speaking. A soft opening by the viols leads into the first stanza; the setting remains relatively quiet until a heavy emphasis on the word “fell”. The mood then becomes fittingly bleak. At the opening of the second stanza Dashon Burton’s voice seems to rise from almost immeasurable depths, so that the piece can end with a strong sense of uplift. It almost goes without saying that the work of Parthenia (Beverley Au, Lawrence Lipnik, Rosamund Morley and Lisa Terry) is impeccable. Dashon Burton has a tremendous voice which, on this limited evidence, he can clearly use both powerfully and sensitively. Looking at his website, it comes as no great surprise to learn that he has sung the role of Sarastro as well as singing Jupiter in Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, with Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques. He has also premiered a number of modern works. He seems well-suited to the performance of Thorns. After listening to it several times, I am eager to hear more both of Tawnie Olson’s work and of Dashon Burton. Both were new to me and I am favourably impressed.
It is with the rest of this CD that I am rather less impressed. I didn’t listen to the disc in running order. When I came to listen to Frances White’s A flower on the Farther Side I brought with me relatively high expectations, after rather taking to From a fairy tale. However, my expectations were largely unfulfilled. Still, let me defer my reasons for that comment for a while. The disc actually opens with a performance of Hildegard von Bingen’s ‘Alleluia, O virga mediatrix’ by an unaccompanied female voice (the CD documentation doesn’t explicitly identify the singer; conceivably it is Kristin Norderval, though it doesn’t sound like the same voice that we hear in Nothing Proved Can Be). It is appropriate, for at least three reasons, that the album should begin with this piece. Firstly, because no other composer could better begin a disc of works by women composers. Secondly, because its text – in praise of the Virgin Mary – anticipates the ‘Virgin Queen’ of Nothing Proved Can Be and, less obviously, the solitary girl of From A fairy Tale as well as the Jesus of Thorns. Thirdly, and most immediately, because Frances White’s A flower on the Farther Side was, in the words of the booklet note by James Pritchett, “inspired” by White’s “happening upon a chant by Hildegard of Bingen ….”. The title she gave to the resulting piece is taken from Barbara Newman’s somewhat free translation of Hildegard’s Latin text: “light/burst from your untouched/womb like a flower/on the farther side/of death”. Elsewhere on this disc, the interplay of viols and electronics results in some fascinating and beautiful passages, with the electronics enhancing and extending the sonorities of the viols. In A Flower on the Farther Side, however, it seems to me to be more a case of the electronics - especially in some drone effects – distorting and submerging the sound of the viols. So, oddly, I find myself in a situation where the work I most enjoyed and admired and the one I found least interesting or satisfying were created by the same composer – Frances White.
In great part this CD is an attractive and intriguing ‘cross-breeding’ of ancient and modern (I prefer to think of the human voice as an eternal musical resource and so standing beyond this antithesis). Any who (like me) loves a top-class consort of viols - and is also musically open-minded (which I like to imagine I am) - will surely find Nothing Proven, which is made up entirely of world premiere recordings, a rewarding disc.
Glyn Pursglove
