Canadian composer with a nomad’s soul
Belgrade-born Canadian composer Ana Sokolović has a nomad's soul: restless and curious, hospitable and open. She collects sounds and colours around her like prized jewels, and offers to trade them for emotion and honest connection.
Her newest work, Golden slumbers kiss your eyes ... presents like a travel journal. The journey and the traveller are only loosely sketched.
The piece, which had its world premiere Thursday with the NAC Orchestra, was composed as a tribute to NACO founder Mario Bernardi, and part of it refers to Bernardi's Italian immigrant roots and his love for the human voice.
But Sokolović was also inspired by childhood, and the vivid, Turkish-carpet imagery she conjures would not be out of place in a kid's rambling bedtime story.
The work, scored for orchestra, choir, and counter-tenor soloist, is made up of seven short movements.
Each section is in a different language and character, separated by gentle brush sweeps on a drum that evoke a breeze rustling through the pages of a book.
There is the title movement, Elizabethan in its gentle formality. Mie mama mata mata, sung in Venetian dialect, is a comical nonsense romp. Tarantella del Gargano has an operatic intensity, while Durme, durme slides and sleepwalks through a haunting pale landscape.
Sokolović has produced a creation of sublime enchantment and subtle wit.
She makes the choir shriek and wail, or mimic the percussion instruments, human beatbox style, or twitter like birds or naughty children.
Special praise goes to Laurence Ewashko for his impeccable preparation of the singers, pulled from the Cantata Singers, Ewashko Singers and Capital Chamber Choir.
Dressed in a black brocade frock coat and looking like a fairy tale courtier, Canadian counter-tenor David DQ Lee delivered a terrifically charismatic and alluring performance.
He has an amber voice, warm, luxurious, slightly cloudy, and he uses it to give this new music the sensuality and drama a Baroque oratorio.
There is a thrilling, stunningly controlled passage where he descends down the curving staircase of his voice, from the dramatic mezzo top to the baritone range. It's a moment of pure Sokolović fantasy, with a frisson of androgynous shapeshifting.
Conductor Johannes Debus was making his NACO debut. Debus is music director of the Canadian Opera Company, and his experience with vocal music made him a sympathetic, reassuring guide through Sokolović's strange empire.