Talisker Players combine poetic and mythical traditions for an innovative night of modern vocal chamber music.
Talisker Players at Trinity-St Paul’s United Church, Jeanne Lamon Hall, Wednesday, March 2
The great literary critic Lionel Trilling referred to the intersection of literature and politics as “the bloody crossroads”, suggesting that the exercise of human control and the exercise of human expression inevitably leads to bodily harm. He was thinking of poetry, fiction, and related creative writing, but it’s not hard to see how this crossroad is arrived at in the musical sphere. While the crossroads may be bloody, they are also beautiful, generating works of art that simply could not have occurred without this tragic encounter.
Spirit Dreaming, the program of words and music by the Talisker Players, presented an array of compositions that drew on the musical heritage of indigenous people around the globe. The indigenous cultures featured included the Plains Cree nation, the Creole, the Cabaclo, the Sami, the Haida and the Taureg. Creation stories from Madagascar, Brazil, Finland, Africa, North America and Melanesia prefaced each of these performances. It made for a thought-provoking evening, that demonstrated how much there is in common between these disparate communities because they draw on the same ingredients even as they develop their unique forms of expression. Wherever human settlement occurs, nature inspires awe and fear and prompts the urge to imitate and venerate it through sound.
An outstanding example of this was the final piece on the program, Island Dreaming, (String Quartet no 13) by Tasmanian composer Peter Sculthorpe, with a text taken from the peoples of the Torres Strait. It captured the sound of a rolling sea in dialogue with the winds above it and the seabirds soaring in the skies overhead. It was the most effective rendering of bird song that I have ever heard. I felt as if I could smell the salt air, and feel the rocking of a current beneath my chair in the entirely stable Jeanne Lamon Hall at Trinity-St Paul’s United Church. Mezzo Soprano Laura McAlpine’s resonant chant in a throaty lower register gave the sense of a bracing journey in which the elements and the humans are barely maintaining a tenuous balance. Both McAlpine and Soprano Ilana Zarankin were called upon to exhibit a diverse range of vocal effects, ranging from incantation to declamation. Zarankin was especially affecting in imparting meaning to music that came only with “syllabic text” with a range of vocal and facial expressions as well as body language.
It’s a complicated matter to present music created by colonizers, even when it is clearly a kind of homage to the indigenous cultures, but it is also important for us to be aware of how much is drawn from these sources so we can give them their due. Whenever great cultural traditions come into contact, they change each other. But one thing doesn’t change – the vocal artists wore the standard formal recital gowns of the concert stage, with the fitted bodices and full skirts that create the hourglass figure. These seemed more formal and stiffer than the music warranted, particularly with the other musicians, who all wore black, but looser, less structured and more relaxed clothes. This is not a fashion issue, but one of movement and fluidity, which would have been more in keeping with the music.
#LUDWIGVAN
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