Review: Fear No Music's Monologues and Dialogues concert

Fear No Music closed out its 32nd season at The Old Church (May 6) with another on-the-edge-of-the-precipice concert entitled Monologues and Dialogues. It featured five recent works by women composers - which by the way means that FNM presented 26 women composers this past season. Kudos to FNM’s artistic leaders, Kenji Bunch and Monica Ohuchi, who have a terrific knack for finding fresh and engaging works!

The first piece on the concert program was the most unusual and daring. If featured soprano Maddy Ross and flutist Amelia Lukas performing “Only The Words Themselves Mean What They Say” which is the second movement of a longer work by Kate Soper called “Ipsa Dixit” (“she, herself, said it”) (2016). Soper’s piece expresses text from the poetry of Lydia Davis by having the singer switch back and forth from a sprechstimme to singing, with no particular melodic line. The flutist also alternates between playing the bass flute and speaking parts of the text, and sometimes singing into the flute.

Ross’s uncanny ability to jump from a spoken line to stratospheric notes – coupled with Lukas’ wizardry with extended techniques on the flute to create unusual sounds – made “Only The Words Themselves Mean What They Say” a mesmerizing number. I didn’t get all of the words, but it seemed that some of it had to do with a breakup in which a man told a woman to “go away” and “You should not come back ever!” Ross and Lukas filled the air with anger and panic and other transitory emotions. It was almost overwhelming to hear but very powerful.

Returning the audience to a much calmer space, violist Kenji Bunch played Reena Esmail’s “Take What You Need.” This brief piece, written in 2016 by the Indian-American composer, has lyrics that are kind of like meditative words to help you focus on your breathing. But the lyrics weren’t needed while Bunch wove a gentle melody occasionally slipping in eloquent glassy tones with no vibrato then changing to a lower, throaty sound.

Lukas played Gemma Peacocke’s “Fear of Flying” for flute and fixed electronics. A native of New Zealand, Peacocke wrote the piece on commission from Bang on a Can during the pandemic in 2020. It was inspired by an eponymous poem by Teresia Teaiwa in Gilbertese, which is an Oceanic language spoken in the islands of Kiribati in the South Pacific. The electronics provided a background of rhythmic beats while Lukas executed brief, lyrical flights up an down the flute, eliciting an ephemeral yet pleasant atmosphere.

Ross and pianist Jeff Payne, performed Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Hvolf” (“Dome”) (2009), a setting of a poem of the same title by Sigurbjörg Prastardottir. A single note on the piano was followed by a single tone from the singer with words that may or may not have mattered. According to the program notes, the piece was meant to evoke the Norther Lights on a cold night. The slow-moving style of the piece and the zero-vibrato of the singer’s voice made me think of an ice floe drifting slowly across an inland sea. The music generated feelings of isolation and introspection, but I especially enjoyed the blurry, fog-bound chord from the piano towards the end of the piece. That was mystical.

The atmosphere lightened up considerably when pianist Monica Ohuchi and violist Bunch launched into “Suite in Jazz Style” by Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova (2009). In the first movement, the bouncy syncopations from the piano interacted well with the viola, which transitioned from pizzicatos to a slinky sound. The second fashioned a lazy, relaxed mood that was underscored by a gnawing sound from the viola. The third started with quick, rhythmic rapping on the side of the keyboard. The uptempo barreled ahead with Ohuchi and Bunch travelling along paths that seemed to crisscross and diverge before arriving at a big, virtuosic cadenza that Bunch tossed off with elan. The duo then swept into the finale with gusto.

So now that FNM has given us Monologues and Dialogues, what’s next? Ah... Soliloquies