"Inspired by Finland's national epic the Kalevala, John Zorn's Jumalattaret is less a song-cycle than a musical seance, summoning a series of spirits and goddesses in sound. The singer morphs from persona to persona in yelps and keening cries, guttural moans and shouts, sometimes anchored, sometimes released by the piano (here Bertrand Chamayou) an ever-present sorcerer's assistant. On the page it sounds like a novelty, a circus-act for high-wire soloists, but in Hannigan's delivery it was strange musical magic: lyrical, primal, ravishingly beautiful."
"Messiaen's 1938 Chants de Terre et de Ciel the second of only three large-scale works by the composer for voice and piano shares the spiritual ecstasy of the Zorn, answering its eternal feminine with the sternly masculine God of Catholicism. It's home-territory for both Chamayou, whose piano seems to speak with French vowels, and Hannigan, who caressed Messiaen's texts with almost indecent intimacy, rolling them around in her mouth, letting them move through her gently swaying body."
Historically unperformable works can become repertoire staples through daring interpretation and study. Barbara Hannigan performed John Zorn's Jumalattaret, a Kalevala-inspired sequence of vocal personas that shifts between yelps, keening cries and guttural moans, accompanied by Bertrand Chamayou's percussive piano. Zorn's 2012 score integrates folk, rock, plainchant and jazz before fracturing them into glittering sonic fragments, producing lyrical yet primal textures. The programme paired the Zorn with Messiaen's 1938 Chants de Terre et de Ciel, whose devotional intensity and masculine theology contrasted and complemented the Zorn's feminine spirits, realized through Chamayou's French-inflected pianism and Hannigan's intimate text shaping.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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