NACO performance.Andre Ringuette
The National Arts Centre Orchestra continued the western leg of its cross-country Canada 150 tour on Thursday at Calgary's Jack Singer Concert Hall with a performance of the orchestra's multimedia creation Life Reflected.
The 80-minute program, led by NACO artistic director Alexander Shelley, premiered in Ottawa in May, 2016, and was reprised at Toronto's Luminato Festival last June. Three of the four compositions were written by Canadian female composers – Zosha Di Castri, Jocelyn Morlock and Nicole Lizée. John Estacio's symphonic tone poem I Lost My Talk, inspired by Mi'kmaq poet Rita Joe's 15-line poem of the same name, capped the evening, and it drew an enthusiastic ovation from the 1,000-plus listeners.
The Edmonton-based composer's treatment of Joe's poem, in which the narrator demands her Indigenous voice back, could be evocative of any number of other subjects. The style was recognizable for Estacio's melodic and harmonic congeniality. The lushly orchestrated music had a filmic gravitas, especially in the string parts. But there was nothing overtly aboriginal-sounding in the piece. The agony of loss may be universal, but the poem is unequivocally about a particular cultural experience, which remained remote from Estacio's vocabulary. The music itself, like many other Estacio pieces, will no doubt find its way onto future symphony programs on its own.
What was Indigenous, though, were the dancers, seen on three screens enclosing the back of the stage. They interpreted the music and the words with an array of modern dance gestures that glossed the poem's message poignantly. And the setting of the dance on the limestone shoreline of some northern Canadian lake evoked the history of people such as Joe, whose culture was "snatched away," as the poet puts it.
This issue of integrating graphic elements with programmatic composition was problematic for most of the pieces. Jocelyn Morlock's music was bafflingly one-dimensional in My Name Is Amanda Todd. Amanda Todd's horror story may have elements of bravery, but it is also sordid and tragic. The visuals for this piece included an imaginatively animated flow of images suggesting the computer language of the digital world that trapped the British Columbia teen and drove her to suicide, as well as depictions of a kind of cosmic transcendence conveyed by angular beams of light and spirographic snowflakes gracefully manoeuvring in space. (Amanda's nickname was Princess Snowflake). The music reinforced this beatific slant on the tragedy, with nods to lyrical minimalism and some quite beautiful fugal writing toward the end. The message of the sweet sounds and playful graphics was coherent, but a dark side of the story was ignored. Amanda's mother, Carol Todd, was in the audience.
Di Castri's music underpinned an adaptation of Alice Munro's short story Dear Life, read on tape by Canadian actor Martha Henry. The scenes on the screen for this first piece were a series of black and white photos of people and places presumably representing Munro's Southern Ontario world, where much of her fiction is set. Henry's narration was sonorous, and the old images established an antique atmosphere as a setting. And Di Castri's music gave the story space to breathe. This attentiveness to her duty to the words and their meaning was impressive.
Soprano Erin Wall joined the orchestra for Dear Life, and sang mostly incidental, melismatic lines, stationed at the back of the first violins. She could have used a mic for this kind of theatrical concept. Hearing her penetrate the space would have given her more presence in the mix.
Of the four pieces, Lizée's Bondarsphere was the most completely integrated multimedia concept of them all. That's not to say that all of her choices were self-evidently related to the biography of Roberta Bondar, Canada's first female astronaut. Unlike the other three composers, Lizée is an experimentalist. She's comfortable in the multimedia world and, like Bondar, she is an explorer, in the line of composers such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley. She overdubs and loops musical fragments and words as much to make interesting rhythmic and structural statements as to conjure any discernible narrative. The effects can be jarring, compelling or both.
To prepare, Lizée compiled hours of archival footage from Bondar's 1992 mission to the international space station, including the news coverage and general excitement it generated. She abruptly short-circuited a newscast at one point to capture the syllable "ment" in "experiment," and off she went with whatever she could think of to express her utterly non-classical sensibility in an intricately "composed" form.
The NACO continues its tour with stops in Edmonton, Victoria and Vancouver. Only the Calgary and Vancouver audiences will get to hear Life Reflected. After Vancouver, a small contingent of the 70 players will head north to Whitehorse, Iqaluit and Yellowknife to complete the project, which began in the Maritimes in the spring.
Life Reflected will be the centrepiece of a National Arts Centre Orchestra tour of Europe in 2019.
Special to The Globe and Mail