Debut albums from young singers usually play it fairly safe but mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo’s is anything but. Her new album, enargeia, on the Deutsche Grammophon label is bold indeed. All twelve tracks on the album feature works by contemporary female composers, though with a nod to Hildegard von Bingen. The accompaniments vary from solo cello to orchestra augmented with electric guitar, electric bass and drum kit. Singing style varies from austerely classical to verging on rock opera.

This could come off as pretentious but it doesn’t. Rather it convinces as a well thought out programme by a very intelligent and thoughtful musician with the self confidence to challenge the orthodox. The organising principle lies in the album title. “Enargeia” is a classical Greek term that means the quality of extreme vividness, radiance or presentness. Each piece on the album, and its text, contributes to that sense.

The tone is set with the opening number; Hildur Gu∂nadóttir’s Fólk fær andlit (in an arrangement by Jarkko Riihimäki). A couple of repetitive phrases in Icelandic about mercy and forgiveness are floated in pure tone over an austere accompaniment of strings and winds. The effect is hypnotic. And there’s more Gu∂nadóttir later. Her Lí∂ur is similar in overall feel but has the added sonorities of bass clarinet, double bass and electronics.

Sarah Kirkland Snider is represented by two very different kinds of music. There are two settings of Hildegard von Bingen; O virtus sapientae and Caritas, arranged for string quartet (plus harp on Caritas). The first carries on the meditative mood of the first track but the second is busier and slightly troubling; a theme that will develop throughout the album. The other Snider tracks are taken from her song cycle Penelope (text by Ellen McLaughlin) which riffs on Homer’s Odyssey to explore the trauma of war and PTSD. The style here is much less “classical” (though not nearly as redolent of synth pop as the original album!) with the final number; The Lotus Eaters, sounding like it could have come from a rock opera.

The final composer represented is Missy Mazzoli with excerpts from both Vespers for a New Dark Age (text by Matthew Zapruder) and Song from the Uproar (texts by Royce Vavrek and arranged by Riihimäki) plus A Thousand Tongues to a text by Stephen Crane. There’s also a setting for voice, cello and synthesizer of von Bingen’s O frondens virga. In various ways and very different styles these works all explore the nature of religious truth, past and present. The styles vary from the sparsely accompanied plainchant like setting of the von Bingen to the busy, unsettling and much more vocally dramatic This world within me is too small from Song from the Uproar.

The striking thing about the performances here is D’Angelo’s rock solid technique across rather a wide range of styles. Some of the von Bingen settings leave the voice very exposed and demand great clarity of tone and diction. Then again, others require a much more raw sound, above all in the final track, The Lotus Eaters (from Penelope), where D’Angelo is much freer and she switches into “rock dialect”; t’s become d’s and so on. If that wasn’t enough, she conducts the opening track herself.

The core of the accompaniment is provided by das freie orchester Berlin conducted (mostly) by Jarkko Riihimäki or the Kuss Quartet; each on occasion supplemented by soloists playing instruments ranging from glockenspiel to electric guitar. As noted, many of the works are given in arrangements by Riihimäki, possibly because the originals were designed sonically as concept albums rather than for concert performance, and so the sound here is often a little more “classical” than on the original releases (very much the case with Penelope and Song from the Uproar). In any event it’s all very accomplished.

The recordings were made in the Jesus-Christus Kirche and the Kirche zum Heiligen Kreuz in Berlin and are excellent. The natural acoustic seems quite resonant and there’s some clever sound engineering going on in places to get a soundspace appropriate to each track. The disk comes with full texts and a very thoughtful programme note by D’Angelo.

In the end what impresses about this album is its ambition and the skill with which that ambition is realised. It’s a carefully curated programme of music by some of the most exciting contemporary female composers, thematically arranged in a thought provoking way. D’Angelo reveals herself here as not just a prodigiously talented young singer but a musical mind of some depth.

The disk is available as a physical CD, vinyl, MP# and standard and 96kHz/24 bit FLAC.

This review originally appeared in the Winter 2021 edition of Opera Canada.

Catalogue number: Deutsche Grammophon 4860536