Alan Cooper reviews: Jillian Bain Christie
Music in the University in association with sound
Jillian Bain Christie: Soprano and composer
Catherine Herriott: Piano
King’s College Chapel, Aberdeen
Thursday, 06 November 2014
Thursday evening’s vocal recital by Jillian Bain Christie followed on from a radically different performance by Philip Mead the celebrated master of contemporary piano repertoire. Jillian took us on an enlightening journey through some real gems of the Scandinavian vocal repertoire. There was however just one really contemporary piece in the programme. The composer? It was none other than Jillian Bain Christie herself. Strandarkirkja (The Church on the Coast) was an extraordinarily atmospheric piece based on a legend surrounding a real church built on a lava flow in an extremely isolated spot on the south coast of Iceland. The church stands quite alone in a desolate uninhabited landscape. The legend has it that a group of Icelandic sailors found themselves in terrible danger at sea near this hazardous part of the coast. On the edge of disaster an angel appeared and came towards the boat guiding all the sailors to safety. The church was built on the very spot where the men reached land.
Strandarkirkja uses pre-recorded vocals sung by Jillian Bain Christie herself. Although she has extended many of her vocal samples in duration and colour, no change was made to any of the original vocal pitches across Jillian’s amazingly wide vocal range. The recorded sounds created an ethereal wash of sound that suggested all sorts of ideas – the voices of some long disappeared monastic choir, some strange heavenly orchestra or else an amorphous cloud of far-off angelic voices that came from everywhere and nowhere around us at the same time. Jillian also sang live over the backing track using ancient Icelandic or Latin texts giving thanks for the miracle that brought about the building of the church and ending in a series of Hallelujahs that seemed to recede back into the past from whence the story came.
Jillian Bain Christie’s singing voice is the purest distillate of luminous soprano quality. It contributed in large measure to the genuine sounding Scandinavian aura that surrounded this and all the other performances in the programme.
Pianist Catherine Herriott was also a fabulous accompanist and as one member of the audience commented – there has surely never been such a well matched team of singer and accompanist as we heard on Thursday night.
Actually the first song item in the recital was not Scandinavian at all. It was from a familiar American composer with whom Jillian has worked before. A Winter Come is a six piece song cycle by Morten Lauridsen – no stranger to King’s College Chapel. However the poems, by Howard Moss (1922-1987) Poetry Editor of the New Yorker Magazine from 1948 until his death, with their graphic images of winter landscapes were not at all out of sympathy with Thursday’s Scandinavian theme. Lauridsen’s crisp piano writing and bracing vocal lines were given a beautifully accomplished performance by the perfect team of Catherine Herriott and Jillian Bain Christie. The purity of Jillian’s singing and her perfectly clean clear diction made these songs really spring to life. I loved the fifth poem setting, Who Reads by Starlight, in which Morten Lauridsen’s musical depictions of fire and flame had delicious echoes of his Six Fire Songs.
Demanten på Marssnön (The Diamond on the March Snow) and Illalle (To Evening) settings of first a Swedish and then a Finnish poem by Sibelius were very attractive romantic imaginings with lovely smooth soaring vocal parts complemented by beautifully delicate piano scoring.
Purjein kuutamolla (Sailing in the moonlight) by the Finnish composer Tovio Kuula (1883 -1918) and Fylgia (Spirit) by the Swedish pianist and composer Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871 – 1927) were delightfully lyrical settings that deserve to be better known.
Another Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén (1872 – 1960) did achieve considerable fame in Great Britain in the 1950’s for his Swedish Rhapsody No.1 Op.19 – it was always on the radio. Jillian and Catherine proved that more of his music is worth hearing with their fine performance of Skogen Sover (The Forest Sleeps).
The duo concluded their recital with two songs by Edvard Grieg, Ein Traum and The Swan.
This was a fascinating recital for Aberdeen University music and sound and even if the Scandinavian songs were not principally part of the most advanced contemporary repertoire they were nevertheless new to me and to most of Thursday’s audience and therefore as in that sense they were indeed “new music” they deserved their place in a sound concert programme.
© Alan Cooper, 2014
