Slow Rise Music (Tristan Zaba and McKenzie Warriner) presented a concert called here be sirens on Saturday night at the Tranzac.  Apparently it’s their third concert but they are new to me and I’m really happy to find a new collaboration of young musicians putting on quite experimental shows of the kind I saw last night.  It’s something that was common enough before the plague but has been slow making a comeback.

The centrepiece of the programme was the Here Be Sirens Suite by Kate Soper.  It’s five movements drawn from her 2014 opera Here Be Sirens.  (The full opera is available on Vimeo).  The suite uses four sopranos (Natalya Gennadi, Midori Marsh, Shantelle Przybylo, McKenzie Warriner) who sing and do unspeakable things to a piano.  It’s an evocative piece; tonally and rhythmically complex, evoking the lure and terror associated with these seductive but murderous monsters.  This part of the show was staged with suitably dreamy costumes and atmospheric lighting.  I didn’t mind the text being incomprehensible.  After all, I don’t suppose Odysseus and his men had surtitles either.  Presented in three chunks it provided a framework for the whole show and was very effectively done.

Beckoning, by Paul Lessard, is a solo piece for “open instrumentation” portraying the encounter between a siren and a sailor ending, inevitably, with his death.  There are also background electronics of ocean noises.  The first time we encounter the piece it’s performed on solo cello by Bryan Holt but it comes back later in the programme sung by Midori Marsh.  It’s an interesting and rewarding exercise in story telling.

Sigh, Run, Cry, by Tristan Zaba, is an electronic four channel track mixed from sampled sounds.  It’s quite bleak and also explores an aspect of the siren myth; the idea of women’s voices as in some sense dangerous although it evokes that idea rather than, say, actually using women’s voices.  It worked pretty well even though I probably wasn’t sitting in absolutely the best place (roughly half way between the rear speakers).  It would be really fun to run this through the ATMOS set up at Universal!

soft hands, by Ashley Seward, uses all four sopranos plus the VC2 cello duo, conducted by Jo Greenaway, to explore the processes of undoing and becoming involved in gender transition through the idea of death, at the hands of the sirens, and rebirth with strong echoes of the Odyssey.  It’s a densely layered piece and here it probably would have been better had one been able to read the text (provided) but that’s tricky in the dark!

The two halves of Aida Khorsandi’s electronic piece Sheevan framed the soprano version of Beckoning.  It deals with grief and, specifically, the death of children.  Grim but effective.  Last before a return to Here be Sirens we got Kathryn Knowles A Lure of Freedom for two cellos (VC2) and electronics including the composer’s own voice.  This one effectively evokes the way the siren myth evokes both desire and a sense of something more powerful than ourselves as well as the ambiguous nature of that which we call “freedom”.

The set design (Jessica Hiemstra) and lighting (??) was cleverly done and the electronic side (Tristan Zaba) was trouble free  All in all, a fascinating evening listening to how different composers react to and interpret the same myth and the rather complex set of ideas embedded in it.  I’m so glad that this sort of event is happening again!