FINDING HER voice
Estacio’s new score brings Rita Joe’s powerful poem to life and ranks among the composer’s best works
I Lost My Talk NAC Orchestra Reviewed Thursday.
Mi’kmaq poet Rita Joe lost her talk as a child at residential school in Nova Scotia. Composer John Estacio and the NAC Orchestra have returned it to her, giving voice to her words and her spirit.
I Lost My Talk is the second of four major new commissions artistic director Alexander Shelley is premièring during his debut season. All four centre on the lives of Canadian women. The first, Dear Life, was based on a short story by Alice Munro. The next two are said to feature Roberta Bondar, the first Canadian woman in space, and Amanda Todd, the teenager whose tragic death prompted a national discussion about online bullying.
The setting of Joe’s brief but powerful poem of the same title features an eloquent new score by Estacio, choreography by Santee Smith, and film by Barbara Willis Sweete, all directed by Donna Feore. The music was commissioned for the orchestra by former prime minister Joe Clark’s family, as a 75th birthday present (Clark, his wife Maureen McTeer and daughter Catherine attended Thursday’s world premiere.)
I can’t recall ever hearing a bad work by Estacio, but this piece ranks among his very best compositions for orchestra. The writing is eminently accessible but never simplistic or condescending. Estacio has a wonderful sense of orchestration, evocative but not cliché. There are bursts of birdsong from the flute, and the rustle of wind in the percussion and strings. Estacio artfully suggests Joe’s sense of “having two talks” — her native tongue and the language forced on her at school — through bitonal sections, the orchestra playing in two clashing keys simultaneously.
Actor Monique Mojica brought Joe’s poem to life. Sweete’s film featured Smith’s choreography performed by a group of expressive aboriginal contemporary dancers, shot against an iconic Georgian Bay landscape of twisted trees, bare smooth rock and bright water.
I Lost My Talk closed an evening of enjoyable music.
Earlier British violinist Daniel Hope was a persuasive salesman for Korngold’s irrepressible, cinematic violin concerto. Hope and Shelley have recorded the work together and their camaraderie created a lively party atmosphere. Hope, who plays a magnificent 1742 Guarneri Del Gesu, has a fat, buttery sound, spectacular lefthand facility and a silky musicality that makes no apologies for Korngold’s unabashedly romantic score.
John Williams’s theme from Schindler’s List received a sensitive performance, although whenever I hear Williams’s music, I’m vaguely resentful that my emotions can be so shamelessly yet effectively manipulated.
The evening opened with Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 9. Shelley appeared to take its cheerfulness at face value, abstaining from a more sarcastic or ironic reading. However, the oppressive, creaking heaviness of the second movement was admirably conveyed, led by Kimball Sykes’s sinuous solo. Principal bassoon Christopher Millard turned the third and fourth movements into an elegy.