Soprano Dory Hayley has spent years preparing for the unique demands of Georges Aperghis's 14 Récitations
“You’re yelling, crying, laughing, gasping, and using breath in a forceful range,” the soloist says of Vancouver New Music concert
Vancouver New Music presents Dory Hayley—Récitations by Georges Aperghis at the Annex on April 22 at 8 pm; artist chat with Matthew Talbot-Kelly at 7:15 pm
COMPOSED IN 1977 and 1978 by Georges Aperghis, 14 Récitations is an epic solo work for female voice, swinging between operatic high notes and gutteral growls, screaming, whispering, and rapid-fire fragments of text.
Soprano Dory Hayley has been working toward performing the entire concert-length, unaccompanied song cycle with Vancouver New Music for years. And so, when Stir reaches her right after a full run-through rehearsal of the punishing score, it’s surprising to find her sounding so… composed.
“If you had called two minutes earlier I would have been out of breath, so I did have time to recover,” the Vancouver artist says with a laugh. “There are so many notes to negotiate, and the other thing you might not think of as a singer is that it’s very hard to sing this without getting hurt. You’re yelling, crying, laughing, gasping, and using breath in a forceful range, and also forcing the voice. So one of the biggest challenges is figuring out how to sing it. And it takes both physical and mental stamina.”
Hayley first encountered the Greek-born, Paris-based composer’s avant-garde Récitations when she was preparing her final doctoral recital at Université de Montréal. She recalls that it was the sheer visual appeal of the strange and beautiful-looking score that first attracted her eye. In Récitation 8, the notes rise and fall like the peaks of an electrocardiogram; in
Récitation 9, the squiggling and slashing notation rises like a mountain slope.
As she started to explore the music, Hayley was immediately drawn to its witty atonal world of extended vocal techniques and complex musical puzzles.
It meant freeing herself from the traditional constraints of text. “It's really hovering there on the edge of intelligibility, so every so often you hear a sentence or you hear a melody that sounds like something,” Hayley explains. “For me, it's almost more meaningful than real language. He uses parts of words, and if by chance you end up with little phrases that mean something in French, in that abstraction these meanings come. And sometimes there is a sense of struggling to finish a thought.” In the process, a woman by turns unravels and fights to express her voice.
Hayley is by now well known on the music scene for adventurous contemporary repertoire, including a performance of Morton Feldman’s comparitively quiet and meditative Three Voices at Music on Main’s Modulus Festival last November. She says she’s always been drawn to more abstract works, where a singer doesn’t necessarily start from the text or narrative point of view—perhaps, she posits, because she started out as a violinist. “I ended up being a singer as a mistake,” she says with a laugh. “So I’ve always approached it from a music point of view.”
Hayley has a lot of experience tackling challenging scores, but where, exactly, does an artist start with 14 Récitations? “If I approach a particular one, I have to learn the pitches,” she explains. “When you sing, you don't have any buttons to press—you have to memorize that pitch.”
Hayley was fortunate enough, years ago, to have had the chance to travel to France to meet and work with Aperghis, the prolific composer who originally wrote the song cycle for French comedian and singer Martine Viard.
Hayley’s big takeaway: “He doesn't want any drama put on top of this music. The drama comes from witnessing a performer at their wit's end. The performer is subjected to these completely crazy demands and the audience can see that happening, and there's this awful but also wonderful product out of it.”
Those “crazy” demands have meant hard work, over years, for Hayley. But it’s a piece that she knows, from performing individual Récitations, that crowds thoroughly enjoy. Enhancing the already powerful experience for this performance will be projected imagery by mixed-media artist Matthew Talbot-Kelly of A Knobe Dee; the visuals span live animated AR loops, physical assemblages, and Aperghis’s dazzling score.
“Although it's so difficult for the performer, audiences love this,” Hayley says. “And I love this music. You wouldn't do a project like this if you didn’t.”
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