Volti Begins 46th Season with Digital Electronics

Last night at the Noe Valley Ministry, Volti launched its 46th season with a program entitled Electronics & New Music. Composer-in-Residence Mark Winges presided over electronic gear most (all?) of which was digital. The program began with the world premiere performance of “Becoming Within” by Anne Hege. The Volti vocalists also manipulated a Rope Instrument designed by Hege, which seemed involve laptop technology and apparently some level of supervision from Winges’ facilities. The result was an integration of vocalization and choreography for which viewing was as important as listening.

A more analog approach to electronics figured in Angélica Negrón’s FONO, a four-movement suite with each movement having a lexeme for a title. In many ways this struck me as “middle ground” between more traditional vocalization and sonorities based on those lexemes identified by the movement titles. Somewhat in the spirit of serial music, it also struck me that permutation contributed to Negrón’s approach to composition. While all of this may sound abstract, there was no shortage of expressiveness in Volti’s performance.

“Becoming Within” was commissioned by Volti, but the program featured two other world premieres. The second half began with Victoria Fraser’s “Lux Aeterna.” This struck me as a reflection on the relationship between light and time, particularly since the vocalists performed against a ticking media track. The overall structure involved a bit of playing around with mathematics, but I found the overall flow of the sonorities to rise above any structural details.

Set design by Josef Hoffman showing Yggdrasil in the first act of Die Walküre (photograph by Viktor Angerer, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The other introductory offering was actually a “world premiere preview.” Winges is currently working on s multi-movement composition inspired by Norse mythology entitled Guardians of Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil is a sacred tree in Norse mythology. It is the one that holds the sword that Siegmund appropriates at the end of the first act of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. That may establish the context for the title of the first movement, “Yggdrasil, Held,” which has no verbal text for the choral performance. There was also a preview performance of Winges’ third movement, “Wanting More” (which may describe the rest of us waiting for him to complete his composition).

In the context of the entire evening, I was struck by the fact that the earliest work on the program was composed in 2001. This was Kaija Saariaho’s “four seasons” cycle, entitled Tag des Jahrs. These were settings of late poems by Friedrich Hölderlin, which he published under the pen name Scardanelli. The chorus performed with electronic accompaniment, including taped recordings of the human voice and natural surroundings.

From a personal point of view, I felt a bit overwhelmed by the prodigious diversity of approaches to choral performance in this program; but I was definitely impressed that there was never a dull moment.