Lucy Gellman Photo
Crown Street on the first Tuesday evening of spring — actual spring, none of that solstice rubbish — and nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. A few friends early to a gig at Cafe Nine hung outside the bar, exploring the newfound freedom in jacketless movement and cropped pants. A dog walker passed the darkened windows of Cedarhurst Café. The birds chirped loud, lyric chirps to a falling dusk.
But inside the chrome-walled, soundproofed back room at Firehouse 12, things were another story entirely. John Taylor Ward (pictured at top) was rumbling to the front of the space, muttering under his breath with every ounce of diva he could muster.
Behind him, a string quartet perked up in their seats, interests piqued by the strange and delicious vocal variations flowing straight from Ward to the front rows and center aisles. In the back room, soprano Kristina Bachrach took a break from the words of Manuel de Falla’s Psyché to listen to the rising and falling tides of his voice, a sudden, jubilant explosion of what has been called by scholars “a series of sounds, or phonemes, or the anxious mutterings of a woman.”
In other words, just another night for members of Cantata Profana, who appeared Tuesday evening for a small but rapt audience when they performed Dreams and Visions, the finale of their 2014 – 15 mainstage concert series, at Firehouse 12. Taking on a set that included works by Luciano Berio, Anton Webern, Kaija Saariaho, de Falla, and Arnold Schoenberg, the group stunned, instructed, and delighted for over an hour, leaving an entire room transfixed by the end of the evening.
As a unit, Cantata Profana –– the group has seen several new and returning faces, all of them welcome –– begins and ends with its ambitious, aurally titillating and impressively wide-reaching programs, painstakingly arranged by Conductor and Artistic Director Jacob Ashworth. In the past year, members have flirted hardcore with Béla Bartók, jumped into bed with Thomas Adès and Tennessee Williams, opened the door to Henry Purcell in high heels, and mud wrestled with Gyorgy Kurtag and won. So it may come as no surprise that Tuesday they did the only thing they know how to: outdid themselves, impossibly, again.
Take Ward’s rendition of Berio’s “Sequenza III for Voice,” one of 14 sequenzas written for his wife, mezzo soprano Cathy Berberian. The piece, which hovers between eight and ten minutes depending on its interpreter, requires a vocal frame of reference that is radically different from something like the composers’ Folk Songs of 1964; here, Berio seems to say, are the very capabilities of the human voice turned on their head. A vocalist willing to take the work on must master second-to-second vocal gymnastics that lead to a sort of oral transcendence, what Hmong shamans might call a qaug dab peg of the larynx…and the soul that is driving it.
“There’s such a personality in all of the things that Berio wrote for her [Berberian] that comes through … for any other singer to do it is an act of translation, of seeing what she did –– there are recordings of her doing it –– and then working that into your own body. I feel almost like a cartographer, because there are so many interesting symbols … a lot of saying ‘what does that mean?’ and figuring out what sounds he’s trying to get. I find it to be incredibly fun because I like that detective work … once it’s in performance, I feel really liberated and open and vulnerable in a great way.” Ward said after the concert.
Or Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2, which four of the members performed last summer at a music festival and were eager to return to. Written as the artist was moving away from the romanticism of his earlier compositions and into something much more sinister, the piece is one of those that begs the listener to straddle musical –– and spiritual –– worlds, ultimately hanging onto every word of the “Litany” that accompanies part of the piece.
Long was the journey, my limbs are weary,
The shrines are empty, my anguish is full.
And that’s the thing. Cantata Profana’s concerts are defined by moments like this: Bachrach and Ward’s voices catching perfectly on the right note; cellist Hannah Collins beaming into a measure of Webern’s Langsamer Satz; the group’s collective glow and blush at the final bow. There is, unspoken, the promise that you will leave utterly tickled by something you didn’t know existed going in.
Ashworth put it slightly differently after the concert.
“It’s great to be able to trust people more, and do harder repertoire, and know that you can count on people to not only pull it off, but have fun and bring something really amazing to it.”
To find out more about Cantata Profana, visit its website.