Giacinto Scelsi is a no-holds-barred way to begin a concert of vocal music. Mezzo-soprano Elisa Sutherland and countertenor Timothy Parsons rose to the challenge of slippery precision in his 1973 song Sauh II to open the Ekmeles vocal ensemble’s ‘Spells and Incantations’ concert at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music. The range of emotion they brought to the wavering lines – the naked non-semantic, asymmetric phonemes – was striking. Their voices circled like trapeze artists with a mysterious beauty, sometimes catching one another, never colliding, constantly supporting.
Scelsi is such a shock to the system, even when one knows what to expect, that Vykintas Baltakas’s 2007 Instruktionen zur Durchführung einer alten Liebesbeschwörung, die Ihre/Ihren Geliebte(n) auf einmal und für immer an Sie binden wird (Instructions for performing an ancient love spell that will bind your beloved to you once and for all) was easily received, even when the four voices slipped out of unison, casting disruption into the ancient love spells. There was a joy to it, if a disorienting one, a confidence that the spell would work.
The British-born Hannah Kendall’s This is but an oration of loss has become something of a favourite for the ensemble and with good reason. It was written for them and is a great vehicle, a memorable work that they do well. The piece began with slowly blown harmonicas (the blues suggestion is intentional), forming triads but not melody for several minutes. The voices entered as if a curtain was rising on a scene already in progress. The text is inspired by Zong!, a book-length poem by the Tobagonian writer M NourbeSe Philip about 130 enslaved Africans who were thrown to their death from an English slave ship. The text grew denser, overlapping in varying languages across its ten minutes, coming to a close with the playing of a wind-up music box. It's a devastating piece; one wonders what an evening-length setting of the full poem might be. The premiere of Ekmeles director Jeffrey Gavett’s Wið ymbe completed the first half, drawn from a set of 10th- and 11th-century spells and performed by Sutherland, Parsons and tenor Tomás Cruz. It felt like a summation not just in the return of incantations but in the ebullient and sometimes discordant harmonies.
Gavett opened Mathias Spahlinger’s Verfluchung, which occupied the second half, with a spoken dedication to victims of wars around the world, quoting a recurring line in the piece in English: “Cursed be war, cursed be the work of weapons.” The printed program bore further inscriptions from Bertolt Brecht (greater wars will come “if the hands of those who prepare them... are not broken”) and the composer, stating that his piece should invoke the madness of those who produce weapons. Gavett, soprano Charlotte Mundy and bass Steven Hrycelak initiated a ritual of sorts. It was a very different energy than the first half, with hand percussion beating out quick, start-and-stop tempos, fast syllabic verses that slowly grew recognizable, and quick metered gasping that managed somehow to be propulsive. The taut, broken rhythms and seemingly senses beating of patterns was indeed maddening, as if repeating the same actions and expecting a solution.
Ekmeles make smart work of holiday programming. They've been giving Valentine’s Day concerts of Stockhausen’s Stimmung for several years running and several years back a pre-Thanksgiving concert by the Diné composer Raven Chacon seemed to drive a certain point home. On this night, they summoned the spirit of Halloween not as a horror show but as a bridge between the realms of the living and the dead, between prayers for bliss and tragic laments.
