At the Vancouver Playhouse
Allegra Chamber Orchestra presents FestivElle: Hearing Voices
This concert features the evocative song cycle Hearing Voices for soprano, tape, and orchestra by UK-based composer Jocelyn Pook, featuring soprano Heather Pawsey in this North American premiere of the work. Hearing Voices looks at the individual experiences of mental illness of a series of women from different generations, each portrayed in turn by the solo singer and with the musical potential of the human voice deeply embedded in the score. The staged chamber piece explores the musical and dramatic interaction between the singer and instrumentalists. The work is particularly personal for Pook, whose own family has been touched by mental illness over three generations. It features recorded testimony and writings from artists Bobby Baker and Julie McNamara, Jocelyn's relatives Phyllis Williams and Mary Pook, and the seamstress Agnes Richter, an inmate in a German asylum in the 1890s, who covered her straitjacket with densely embroidered text.
The first half of this program features works created within Allegra’s Composer Incubator, featuring three female composers from all across Canada. These works, created during Covid, shed light on each of the composer’s intimate inner journeys, examining loneliness and ritual in Sasha Kow’s Teatime Stories, our constant battle with our inner saboteur in Holly Winter’s graphic score I’m(post)HER, and the unearthed innocence, joys, and sorrows of a loved one’s experience of dementia, in Mari Alice Conrad’s evocative piece.
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