MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Soprano Barbara Hannigan is known for premiering 21st century music, but on a new album, "Electric Fields," she looks back to the 12th century for inspiration, and as NPR's Tom Huizenga explains, she is doing a lot more here than faithfully recreating the past.
TOM HUIZENGA, BYLINE: Barbara Hannigan and her fellow musicians have fallen under the spell of Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval abbess, visionary poet, scientist, diplomat and composer.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "O VIRGA MEDIATRIX")
BARBARA HANNIGAN: (Vocalizing).
HUIZENGA: That's Hildegard's "A Virga Mediatrix," the curtain-raiser on an album that unfolds like a fever dream, as if you've fallen asleep inside a time machine. The music is 900 years old, but Hannigan - along with pianists Katia and Marielle Labeque and electronics wiz David Chalmin - view it through a modern lens. Hildegard looms large, even over new works like this one by Bryce Dessner who created the text via the secret language Hildegard invented.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "O ORZCHIS ECCLESIA")
HANNIGAN: (Vocalizing, singing in non-English language).
HUIZENGA: This is a fearless album that dares tinker with classics, unearth rare music and pull it all apart. Listen to these fragments of a song by 17th century composer Francesca Caccini, the first woman known to have composed an opera. Baroque meets modern with trippy effects.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHE T'HO FATT'IO")
HANNIGAN: (Singing in non-English language).
HUIZENGA: I admire Hannigan and company working outside their comfort zones, improvising with live electronics. The album took 10 years to realize, and even now, the musicians say they're not sure exactly what they created. The most straightforward track spotlights another neglected Baroque composer, Barbara Strozzi.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHE SI PUO FARE")
HANNIGAN: (Singing in non-English language).
HUIZENGA: That aria, "Che Si Puo Fare," sounds fairly traditional, but the album includes a woozy improvisation on the same song. At over 8 minutes, it can seem a little noodling. Still, it's effective in the larger dreamscape.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHE SI PUO FARE")
HANNIGAN: (Singing in non-English langauge, vocalizing).
HUIZENGA: This album is ethereal and sensuous, and it returns, in its final track, to Hildegard and ends literally on a high note, the long, luscious kind only Barbara Hannigan can offer.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "O VIS AETERNITATIS")
HANNIGAN: (Vocalizing).
HUIZENGA: "Electric Fields" is an experiment that could have gone terribly wrong, but it turned out to be a lucky meeting of disparate musicians who sparked a little dreamy magic while connecting the old with the new.
KELLY: The album is "Electric Fields." Our reviewer is NPR's Tom Huizenga.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.3