Epic art song of the current music concert

Vocalist Shara Nova has an extremely interesting career. Possessing a distinctive, flexible, powerful mezzo, she moves with ease between indie-rock projects such as her own My Brightest Diamond and commissions from contemporary composers such as Nico Muhly and David Lang. In addition, she has composed works for various groups, including several orchestras. Last weekend at Present Music, she offered up perhaps her greatest collaboration to date: The blue hourA 100-minute chamber song cycle co-written with four other composers (Rachel Grimes, Angelica Negro, Caroline Shaw and Sarah Kirkland Snyder) and set to Caroline Forchet’s poem On Earth.

Before that, I don’t think I’d heard (or heard of) a song cycle longer than an hour. This piece, as long as a film, was a lot to take in. I admired his courage in elevating the art song form to something so epic and insisting that we set the entire text of the poem. Moving through letters of the alphabet, poetry attempts to capture a soul moving from life to death, dwelling on specific images and emotions, and thus its length gives it the weight of a midnight vigil. In practice, the program does not include the entire text, but only key phrases that begin each section by each composer.

From a compositional point of view, The blue hour was a triumph of artistic teamwork. The group of composers chose well by keeping the ensemble to strings only, writing in a similar harmonic language and not overdeveloping the material in each short section of the piece. All these factors helped create continuity.

Lush sounds

Under a blue halo of light in the atrium of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Shara Nova presented the entire line of this wonderful, always captivating work. Her voice over the strings was very pleasant to listen to, whether singing or speaking, and she delivered well. I caught about 80% of the text, which is respectable in a piece of this length. Conductor Deanna Tham gave clear cues to keep the ensemble on track, drawing lush sounds from the strings and showing dance-like animation during the faster moments.

Of the individual sections, I particularly enjoyed Caroline Shaw’s contributions; in “J’ai rêvé” she had noble string chords emerging from scratch tones, and “Firmament” went with a poetic reference to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, saturating the music with Bach motifs. She returned to the classics in the movement that concluded the piece, with an arpeggio in a single harmony that recalled Wagner’s opening Rhine gold. Sarah Kirkland Snyder often shapes her sections into dramatic climaxes to showcase Nova’s vocal power, as in “Early summer”. Less intense but heartfelt, “I am alone” featured a beautiful texture of string scales. I enjoyed Nova’s own “Library Lilacs” with tonal painting of text that featured “inexhaustible light” and “Nevertheless” had some nice viola solos played by Alejandro Duque. Angelica Negron’s “Her Hair” was a hypnotic study in string ricochet technique, and “The Hole” memorably set the lyrics “The hole of my mouth where my ancestor stands and burns.” Rachel Grimes made a strong impression in the opening music and in the rich string interlude at the end of “The name”.

In a piece with 40 separate sections, some were less memorable than others. And a few times, as in Grimes’ “In the Toy Store,” mumbled voices or atmospheric sound effects came through the speakers. It created distracting moments where I wasn’t sure if the sounds were part of a tape being played or were created by the performers on stage. The musicians did sing, hum or speak at various points in the score, but the changes were jarring. Those were the only moments that didn’t really fit with the rest of the piece. On another listen, I might see a connection of these choices to the lyrics, as I was distracted enough to miss some of the lyrics at those points.

Copies of Carolyn Forchet’s poetry collection The blue hour were available for sale at a merch table and I had to get one. Again, I can’t overstate how the text was a a lot to digest (and my brain usually prioritizes processing music), but every now and then striking images popped up. One I wrote to myself was “Ganglia on a train map, metastasizing cities.” Using the alphabet as an anchor fits the theme of passing through consciousness and different stages of life. A deeper dive into the poem followed by another dive into the music would certainly be stimulating.

Apparently this piece was only planned to be performed in Milwaukee and Paris, so I feel lucky to have heard it. Despite the long time and some questionable moments of speaking from the musicians, The blue hour is a powerful piece, both intimate and ambitious, and made with heart. This is an exciting new landmark for Shara Nova and a solid showcase for the talent of Carolyn Forché and the composers.