The soprano Juliet Fraser has emerged as one of the most vital forces in new music today, the inspiration for many composers and an outstanding performer of a wide range of contemporary works. The six on What of Words and What of Song, composed either for voice alone or with the most minimal instrumental support, provide a perfect showcase for Fraser’s gifts as an interpreter – not only her technical mastery, but also her seemingly instinctive ability to inhabit the musical worlds of stylistically very different composers with total conviction and understanding. “The voice, here,” writes Fraser, “seems to sing across time. It pivots to deliver echoes of Renaissance polyphony one moment, to usher in the future with otherworldly sounds the next.”
One of two pieces here by Rebecca Saunders begins the disc. Both O for soprano and O Yes & I, which partners the solo voice with a bass flute, are part of a series of vocal works that began in 2016 with the superb Skin for voice and ensemble, and were inspired by Molly Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness monologue in Joyce’s Ulysses. In both works fragments of the text are dissolved into a flux of syllables, so that just the occasional recognisable word emerges from among the mutterings, whispers and occasional outburst. The two works by Beat Furrer also pair the voice with a solo instrument – embedded in the multiphonics and microtones of a trombone in Spazio Immergente I, and vying for supremacy with a double bass in Lotófagos, which is based on a poem in Spanish by José Ángel Valente, itself inspired by the lotus-eaters episode of Homer’s Odyssey.
Enno Poppe’s Wespe is an obsessive riff on a poem about a wasp crawling through a human body, while Chaya Czernowin’s Adiantum Capillis-Veneris I (the scientific name for maidenhair fern) is described as a “study for solo voice and breath”, a gentle tour around a collection of isolated sounds and pitches that is utterly compelling in its pared-down way. Fraser, it almost goes without saying, is compelling in every piece, too.
This week’s other pick
Juliet Fraser also features on Another Timbre’s release of Laurence Crane’s Natural World, in which she is partnered by the keyboard player Mark Knoop. Inspired by the writings of the pioneer environmentalist Rachel Carson, Natural World is a three-part reflection on the fragility of the world around us that never becomes preachy. The voice delivers a litany of encyclopedia entries on birds in the first part, gradually punctuated by recordings of bird song; those develop into a fully fledged dawn chorus in the second, and give way to sounds of the sea and electronic drones in the third, while the voice sings a nursery-rhyme-like song above them. It is wonderfully direct and touchingly beautiful.
