Lim - Singing in Tongues: Operas and Vocal Works 1993-2008
£26.55
In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day
Despatch Information
This despatch estimate is based on information from both our own stock and the UK supplier's stock.
If ordering multiple items, we will aim to send everything together so the longest despatch estimate will apply to the complete order.
If you would rather receive certain items more quickly, please place them on a separate order.
If any unexpected delays occur, we will keep you informed of progress via email and not allow other items on the order to be held up.
If you would prefer to receive everything together regardless of any delay, please let us know via email.
Pre-orders will be despatched as close as possible to the release date.
Label: Huddersfield Contemporary Records
Cat No: HCR25CD
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 3
Release Date: 5th November 2021
Contents
Works
Mother TongueThe Navigator
The Oresteia
Yue Lìng Jie (Moon Spirit Feasting)
Artists
Jeannie van de Velde (soprano)Julie Edwardson (mezzo-soprano)
Deborah Kayser (soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, cello)
Andrew Muscat-Clark (countertenor)
Tyrone Landau (tenor)
Grant Smith (baritone)
Piia Komsi (soprano)
Andrew Watts (countertenor)
Talise Trevigne (soprano)
Philip Larson (bass-baritone)
Omar Ebrahim (baritone)
ELISION
Conductors
Sandro GorliSimon Hewett
Jean Deroyer
Manuel Nawri
Works
Mother TongueThe Navigator
The Oresteia
Yue Lìng Jie (Moon Spirit Feasting)
Artists
Jeannie van de Velde (soprano)Julie Edwardson (mezzo-soprano)
Deborah Kayser (soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, cello)
Andrew Muscat-Clark (countertenor)
Tyrone Landau (tenor)
Grant Smith (baritone)
Piia Komsi (soprano)
Andrew Watts (countertenor)
Talise Trevigne (soprano)
Philip Larson (bass-baritone)
Omar Ebrahim (baritone)
ELISION
Conductors
Sandro GorliSimon Hewett
Jean Deroyer
Manuel Nawri
About
To sing, in Lim’s operas, is an act of ventriloquism through which a body onstage becomes possessed by a second powerful presence – multiple characters, identities, truths, or temporalities vie for embodiment through the voice. There is perhaps no better example of Lim’s staging of this flickering presence than in the ‘Angel of History’ aria at the end of the first scene of The Navigator (2008). The character, borrowed from Walter Benjamin’s meditation on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, is a paradoxical creature who gazes upon the past while being buffeted into the future, caught at the wings by the storm of human progress. As a result, The Angel speaks with a voice that is at once part beast, part deity, part bird, and part human, combining past, present, and future in a single conjugation.
In addition to The Navigator, these discs include world-premiere recordings of Chang-O Flies to the Moon – the sixth scene from Lim‘s opera Yuè Lìng Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting) (2000), in which Chang-O struggles to reconcile in a single body the many versions of herself that populate her myth – and Mother Tongue (2005), perhaps the most significant vocal work of Lim’s beyond the operas, a meditation on the ecology of language and also a radical act of preservation: encased in Patricia Sykes’s libretto are words and sounds from Aboriginal languages now on the brink of extinction.
These are joined by The Oresteia (1993), a remarkable work – even more so considering it was only Lim’s third published composition, undertaken just shy of her twenty-fifth birthday – which was originally released by Dischi Ricordi in 1994, but has long been out of print. This “memory theater in seven parts” summons the characters of Orestes, Electra, Cassandra, Clytemnestra, and Agamemnon into a space to revive, rather than retell, their unrequited feud. The libretto weaves single-word fragments from the Greek play with Tony Harrison’s modern English translation and the poetry of Sappho.
Error on this page? Let us know here
Need more information on this product? Click here