A bald description of Laura Bowler’s Distance would be chamber music for soprano and quintet. But when that soprano is the fearless, sound-barrier-breaking Juliet Fraser, collaborating with members of the fearsome New York-based Talea Ensemble, it’s a different matter.
Bowler has created a multimedia work for them throwing an aural challenge to the listener, setting up an engagement with the ethics of flight and its implications for the environment. In the video-led preamble, an interactive questionnaire invited the audience – via-mobiles – to make a personal investment in the work to follow, examining their consciences. Similarly, Bowler had questioned Fraser, using her feelings about flying as a recurring element of Distance’s text, making Fraser’s identity as a musician an implicit part of the work. Quotes from anthropologist Tim Ingold’s book Correspondences were also integrated.
Distance premiered at Aberdeen’s Sound festival in October last year, with a performance given at the Spitalfields festival the evening before this third outing at Cheltenham. Walking on to the Parabola stage as though on to a plane with her carry-on backpack, Fraser had the preoccupied look of someone ambivalent about flying, but that may have included a moment of trepidation about the logistics of the performance: the Talea players – alto flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, cello, double bass and vivid percussion – were being livestreamed from New York. In fact, the tricks of coordination were faultlessly realised by Distance’s technical team, epitomising the complex questions Bowler was raising about distance and communication.
Yet Fraser was the magnetic focus. Whether speaking words, sometimes just letters, breathing, gasping, throwing out high-lying notes or phrases – the section with the periodically reiterated “I am flying” was most notable – her vocal poise was mesmerising. In the post-amble, it emerged that Fraser herself has committed to no-flying, lowering her own carbon footprint. Not just a wonderful performer, then.
At the Cheltenham festival, which runs until 16 July.
