Inaugurated on Thursday, the 39th rendition of Avanti! Chamber Orchestra’s Summer Sounds festival in Porvoo, Finland, introduced the opening night audiences – in-house and online – to the magical narratives of Ondřej Adámek’s exquisite works for voices and ensemble. As demonstrated by the three quasi-ritualistic scores heard at the Art Factory, Adámek’s musical settings evoke spellbinding aura of layered mysteries, as accounted by the composer’s utmost evocative sounding narratives, filled with enigmatic twists and turns, clad in vocal and instrumental theater of unusual suggestive intensity.
In order to bring the music to its acoustical reality, full-on dedication and thorough grasp of myriads of theatrical and notational detail is called from each and every performer – a challenge endorsed and exceeded with flying colors by the members of Avanti! under Aliisa Neige Barrière’s refined preparation and fine-tuned conducting. Initially, the composer was scheduled to appear on the podium for this year’s opening and closing concerts, but fate had it otherwise, as Adámek had to step in to conduct the Cologne world premiere of his latest opera INES (2023-24) at short notice. Thus, it was no small miracle – thanks to Barrière and his fellow conductor Kristian Sallinen, respectively – that both Summer Sounds programs were unaffected by the last-minute changes in line-ups and rehearsals took place as planned.
Joining the Avanti! instrumentalists on Thursday, two remarkable soprano soloists, Shigeko Hata and Landy Andriamboavonjy, shared the stage with the orchestra and Barrière, providing us with top-tier readings of the three very special musical works, in which various traditions – theatrical and musical – merge into seamlessly organic concertante narratives.
Heard as evening’s absorbing herald, the ca. fifteen-minute Let me tell you a story (2023) for solo voice and an ensemble of bass flute doubling alto flute, English horn doubling oboe, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, two percussion playing a notable setup of instruments, prepared piano, harp and string quintet was given its world premiere performance by Hata and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Clement Power last April. Derived from the Girl Mind episode of Adámek’s opera Seven Stones (2016), Let me tell you a story combines the narrative devises of the Korean pansori tradition with magical storylines by the Icelandic poet Sjón, accounting the mysterious tale of a salesman from Boston wandering in the byways of the ancient Imperial City of Kyoto, where he stumbles upon three women working with black materials, who place a sea-polished rock into his hand, telling him that the stone will provide visions into the girl mind. Addicted to its apparitions, the man spends the rest of his life gazing upon the polished surface until the rock invades his mind – figuratively and physically – leading the anonymous protagonist eventually into his demise.
The soprano soloist opens the score with her incantations, chanting the first unaccompanied lines in spell-like manner, evoking sforzato gestures from the ensemble. She then introduces the recurring pantomime of breathing on the stone in her hand, polishing it with her jacket sleeve and sighing of surprise. These gestures are subsequently mimicked and developed in several ingenious ways by the instruments, while the soloist keeps unfolding the narrative with her chants, whispers and rhythmic recitatives of enthralling intensity, punctuating the fabric by striking her fan open in percussive manner, true to the pansori tradition.
As the storyline proceeds, the musical fabric pans between the solo voice and its instrumental imitations, embellishments and commentaries in dazzlingly organic manner, demonstrating the joint virtuosity of Hata and the Barrière-led Avanti! musicians. Reaching the dramatic twist of the narrative, the soloist picks up a skull filled with stones, leading the music with accelerando rattling to its eerie climax, where the naked skull of the salesman is found in river in Alaska, with the flesh washed away by the water, and a smooth stone found inside the head instead of the brain. Chanted in declamatory manner by the soloist and the ensemble, the shocking high-point is followed by an equally striking coda, where the entire ensemble, one by one, including the conductor lay down their instruments and join the insistently repeating pantomime.
Not many performances have obtained such level of unyielding intensity as Let me tell you a story did upon its Finnish premiere on Thursday. Integrated in sound and spirit, Hata, the ensemble and Barrière delivered a splendid account of Adámek’s intricate score, keeping the listeners under their spell from start to finish. Rarely has there been such uninterrupted silence among the audience as at the Art Factory, where everybody seemed to be transfixed by the onstage events. One for the books, the performance of Let me tell you a story is to be counted among the most enthralling outings accounted in the Summer Sounds annals.
Keeping up with the intensity, the performers moved on to Adámek’s Japanese-tinged Karakuri – Poupée mécanique (2011/2016) for solo voice and an ensemble of flute doubling piccolo and bass flute, bass clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, piano, sampler, harp and string quintet. The title refers to traditional Japanese mechanical puppets, constructed with intricate craftsmanship between the 17th and the 19th centuries.
Cast in four movements, the ca. 20-minute score is derived from an archer pantomime, meticulously described in the score, introduced by the soprano soloist, her each individual movement and sound then gradually picked up by the ensemble for onomatopoetic mimicking and development over the Flèches (Arrows) opening movement. As the voice and the instruments account the trajectory of the arrow form hand to target and all the way to the falling prey, one is again struck by the level of coordination and sonorous interlock between Hata, Barrière and the fourteen players, as they harness Adámek’s repetitions and subtle permutations into intense gestural theater.
In the ensuing Segments, the Karakuri movements are analyzed in detail by the means of utmost dexterous recitative and instrumental music, calling forth extreme concentration, focus and minutiae reactivity from its performers. At the Art Factory, one was simply washed away by the musical wizardry at play, as vocal segments became broken down into syllables and further into phonemes, while their colors and vibrations were examined within the ensemble.
Oscillating on the threshold of sound and silence, Pièces détachées begins as vocalise meditation, embedded with hypnotic repetitions on word-like shapes, woven together with translucent instrumentation. The second half of the movement adopts more kinetic raiment, as cascades of text rain down from the virtuoso soloist, evoking rhythmic patterns across the ensemble. The concluding Automat returns to the core pantomime, subjecting it to moto perpetuo repeats, which keep amplifying at hair-raising intensity, breeding chaos and destruction until the machinery builds up to self-annihilation. Realized with tremendous intensity and tangible sense of danger, Hata, Avanti! and Barrière mastered the score to the finest detail.
Serving as the evening’s reflective finale, Whence Comes the Voice? (2022) for two solo voices, four winds doubling bass flute, English horn, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet and contrabassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, two percussion, piano, harp and string quintet meditates upon itself and the multi-faceted relationships between physical sound, its source and sensations evoked. The ca. twenty-minute setting combines the Qawwali tradition of the Sufi devotional singing with musings from St Augustine and those found in the letter and diaries of a Dutch Jewish writer Etty Hillesum, murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.
The music comes into its flickering being on water gongs, trombone and strings, out of which a full-ensemble instrumental introduction is drawn. The two voices, sung by Hata and Andriamboavonjy, enter the fabric with almost imperceptible subtlety, working their way throughout the instrumental textures, and rising to the surface, to perform their virtuosic takes on the text, its fragments, words and syllables, weighing each phrase with almost concertante multitude of nuance. Expanding the echo chamber, instruments provide further dimensions into the game, giving rise to sounding clouds of riveting harmonic colors. Languid at times, heated at others, the voices and instruments keep ebbing and flowing between repetition and suave variation, until all the musical energy is channeled into spirited dance, bringing the quest of Whence Comes the Voice? to its choreographic close.
Beautifully rendered at the Art Factory, Adámek’s stylistic blends were again served in full measure, resulting in marvelous continuums in sound and idiom – spot-on close to an invigorating programme.
Heard as interludes between the Adámek scores, the singers and Avanti! musicians, joined by Tytti Metsä on the bowed lyre, performed captivating takes on various European and non-Western folk traditions, taking the audience to the very roots of musical storytelling, displaying its essential role in being human. Different, yet interrelated, each musical idiom bridged to the next, reminding us of our shared collective heritage.
Summer Sounds Festival
Avanti! Chamber Orchestra
Aliisa Neige Barrière, conductor
Shigeko Hata, soprano
Landy Andriamboavonjy, soprano
Tytti Metsä, bowed lyre and voice
Ondrej Adámek: Let me tell you a story (2023) for amplified voice and ensemble
Ondrej Adámek: Karakuri – Poupée mécanique (2011/2016) for amplified voice and ensemble
Ondrej Adámek: Whence Comes the Voice? (2022) two amplified voices and ensemble
Folk songs
Art Factory, Porvoo, Finland
Thursday 28 June 2024, 7 pm
© Jari Kallio
AIM - Adventures in Music 
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