CD Reviews
Sewing the Earthworm
Brian Harman, Canadian Art Song Project
review by Cecilia Livingston
T
he Canadian Art Song Project has released another remarkable recording (readers will remember last year’s astonishing Ash Roses, featuring Lawrence Wiliford and Mireille Asselin). Sewing the Earthworm by composer Brian Harman with writer David James Brock, for contemporary music star Carla Huhtanen, “combin[es] elements of poetry, drama, opera and new music” as the song cycle “explores a woman’s loss of physical control over her body and the effect this has on her mental stability.” The dramatic arc over these 21 minutes is sure and compelling: three longer songs anchor the set, with brief, fragmentary interludes interspersed. Unusually, the program notes’ background details—the tenacious, struggling character reflects the life of 1970s punk rocker Wendy O. Williams— are not necessary to an appreciation of the cycle: a sign of truly well-crafted work that allows a wide variety of meanings (I almost wish I’d heard it first and learned these details later). Also unusually, I’m glad that the poems didn’t come with the digital download: what had seemed like a slight annoyance was made irrelevant by Huhtanen’s crystalline diction, and I’m very glad I wasn’t “reading” but truly, theatreimmersively, listening.
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Most remarkable is the extraordinary range of extended techniques for both voice and piano: their natural and convincing use moment-to-moment and in creating the dramatic whole of this extended aria-monodrama. Pianist Steven Philcox’s performance is marvelous: Harman has crafted a piano role so enmeshed with the vocal performance that the piano and the voice are seamlessly this one character’s mind, with all her murmurings, whisperings, asides, grunts, and so on. The piano flits and darts as suddenly as her thoughts, and what seemed initially to be a delicate garden-scape for the character’s first appearance becomes instead an unnerving melding of place and mind. (I also appreciate the spatialisation of the vocal sound in the recording; as it moves, disembodied, it becomes a “voice in one’s head” that darts around like one’s own thoughts.) Harman handles Brock’s texts with skill, using word repetition and the distortion of consonants to enhance the dramatic strength of the character’s naturalistic speech. The entrancing opening, with humming and brushed strings on the piano, and the gentle stopped-strings of the piano in the epilogue, are haunting and ethereal. Huhtanen and Philcox shine in this music that calls for such symbiotic unity of conception and precision of
performance, and the result is a dark, uncanny delight. → F or more information and to purchase
the recording, click here!