Two summers ago at the Aldeburgh festival, the soprano Juliet Fraser produced one of the most memorable musical events of the year, a solo performance of Samuel Beckett’s Not I and Morton Feldman’s Three Voices. For her concert at this year’s festival, Fraser was partnered by the composer and sound engineer Newton Armstrong in three works for voice and electronics, all of them specially composed for her. One, Cassandra Miller’s Tracery: Hardanger, was conceived during a residency at Snape in 2017; another was receiving its first performance, while the third was new to the UK.
The world premiere was Armstrong’s The Book of the Sediments, one of four pieces commissioned by Fraser around the work of the marine biologist Rachel Carson. In this case it was Carson’s description of the millennia-long accumulations of sediments on the ocean floor that suggested the accumulating layers of Armstrong’s score, with the long, slowly shifting vocal lines overlaid on the electronically generated textures. Its glacial slowness was worlds away from the abrupt changes of direction in Rebecca Saunders’ The Mouth, a Beckett-like torrent of words and syllables flitting in and out of comprehensibility, as Fraser runs through her extraordinary repertoire of vocal techniques, supported and reinforced by an electronic soundtrack that is also derived from her voice.
Later, there was another first performance, in a concert given by Ryan Wigglesworth and the Knussen Chamber Orchestra, the ensemble created in 2019 from current and recently graduated Royal Academy of Music students and named in memory of the much-missed composer and conductor, who was so closely associated with Aldeburgh. Wigglesworth’s own Quatre Vignettes de Jules Renard began life as a work for voice and piano, but their subsequent expansion into an orchestral song-cycle commissioned by the festival bears no trace of those more modest origins. The sly, witty portraits of a hen, a toad, a grasshopper and an ox, texts taken from the same collection that Ravel used for his Histoires Naturelles, are brought vividly to life in Wigglesworth’s scoring, which clothes baritone Roderick Williams’ lucid and warm delivery of the rather Poulenc-like word setting in a wonderful array of instrumental colours, and with music by Rameau providing source material for two of the songs.
