Voices NZ’s ‘Horizons’: moving stories of migration
Voices New Zealand’s Music Director Karen Grylls, conducting a performance of Horizons
Image credit: Jo Miller, Gate Photography
Voices New Zealand and their inspiring conductor Karen Grylls presented another dazzling and risk-taking programme when they brought their ‘Horizons’ concert to Wellington for three performances over Labour weekend. It is, in fact, much more than a concert. Horizons offers complete musical storytelling, integrating choral music, movement, staging and lighting linked by poetic narration and evocative percussion colours.
Stories of migration, travel, loss and displacement, trauma, transitions, farewells, greetings and homecomings are told in choral music by composers from across the world. Illustrating the global movement of displaced migrants and others travelling to find a home, the singers are also constantly on the move. Choir and audience are often in close proximity, as stories are shared.
When we arrive, we find St Andrews on the Terrace transformed to a performance space “in the round”, pathways through the audience and a large central space added to the more traditional performance location by the altar. In the very centre is a large heap of white petals which we later discover is a chamomile lawn.
Stage Director Jacqui Coats has devised the seamless choreography, which takes the singers around the space, now as one choir, now several, sometimes a soloist in call and response, sometimes characters in a marketplace or women lamenting the departure of sons and lovers to war. She has also used excerpts from the texts of the songs to create a script for the narrator, actor Nathaniel Lees, who brings mana and presence to the stage as both observer and commentator.
The choir enter as individuals, singing in a layered group improvisation based on the familiar “Going Home”, from Dvorǎk’s 9th Symphony. This shifts into a lovely arrangement of the same hymn-like work by New Zealand composer Brent Stewart, ending on a wide-spaced chord in a thrilling vocal blend. A tolling bell has the singers on the move, disappearing out the back door as Lees takes the stage to explain “I am a witness…they are forced to leave.”
Performers and audience are often close together during the immersive performances of Horizons
Image credit: Jo Miller, Gate Photography
Singing from the upstairs gallery, the choir is disembodied, singing music by Dubai-based British composer Joanna Marsh. Her two ‘Arabesques’ are settings by Arab poets about women, aging and rebirth. Using octatonic scales, Marsh creates close harmonies, occasionally dissonant, evoking shifting desert sands and building to a full-voiced ending, before rattling percussion signals another transition and the choir returns to the main church.
Accompaniment is minimal, mostly provided by percussionist Jeremy Fitzsimmons. The colours of his instruments evoke the sea, the wind, the tolling of bells, drumbeats accompanying a simple folk song or a dramatic disaster.
Centrepiece of the programme is Huwiyati Muhajer, (‘Citizens of Horizons’), a new commission specifically for Voices NZ from Toronto-based Shireen Abu-Khader, a Palestinian Jordanian Canadian artist, composer and educator. In the composer’s words, “this piece tells a particular story of a boat that flips, killing dreams of peace, of finding a place to replace what one calls home, and of a decent life.”
The work begins with cheerful folk songs in a busy marketplace, but the mood quickly shifts to sombre emotions. The choir shifts position in the hall, at first moving around the market, then gathering at the front. As narrator Nathaniel Lees speaks sadly of “the greed of those who exploit the desperate”, effective lighting underlines the changing moods, suggesting a decorative mosque interior or the lightning of a storm at sea. The choir remains at the front of the church, heads bowed in conclusion as the story ends in tragedy.
Music Director Karen Grylls
“…always marvellously in control of her forces.”
Image credit: Jo Miller, Gate Photography
Huwiyati Muhajer is a challenging work to perform, but the choral singing is impeccable, with conductor Grylls, as always, marvellously in control of her forces.
This is the third presentation by Voices NZ that has surprised and thrilled audiences in Wellington and elsewhere in recent years. ‘When the Light Breaks’ in June 2023 explored the five stages of grieving through choral music from the Renaissance, Baroque and contemporary periods, using puppets to enhance the performance. A year ago, in ‘Mozart Reimagined’, Robert Wiremu’s ‘re-composition’ of Mozart’s Requiem evoked the tragedy and the frozen wastes of the Mount Erebus disaster. Coats and Grylls collaborated on both highly successful performances, and next year ‘Mozart Reimagined’ will travel to Dunedin and Wanaka with Chamber Music NZ.
These moving, evocative and innovative performances are the result of ambitious risk-taking and great sensitivity to the subject matter. They have succeeded because the musical performances are consistently outstanding, but also because the accompanying theatrical concepts have been thoughtfully and cleverly devised and executed.
Stage director Jacqui Coats
“…theatrical concepts are thoughtfully and cleverly devised and executed.”
In Horizons, Coats has been influenced by the words of the late Moana Jackson, who spoke of the four pillars that create the notion of ‘home’ in Aotearoa: mountains, dreams, earth and love. “These four pillars,” she says, “form the structure in which this immersive concert hangs.”
Australian composer Joseph Twist’s moving and melodious The Peace of Wild Things is followed by Northern Lights, a joyous work by Latvian Ēriks Ešenvalds, complete with musical glasses and effective hand-held bells amongst the choir. The programme then moves back to our own whenua. In their Miha; A Mass in Te Reo Māori, composer (and choir member) Takerei Komene combines the Latin text of the requiem mass with adaptations of key phrases in te reo. The choir sings two movements, lovely overlapping contrapuntal lines floating from four locations around the church, the use of solo voices against choral textures beautifully managed by both composer and conductor.
“Through all of these songs from the north and the south, all of these lines” narrator Lees tells us, we are “searching for a place to grow, to dream… home is horizons.”
Narrator Nathaniel Lees faces the singers
“…bringing mana and presence to the production.”
Image credit: Jo Miller, Gate Photography
The programme ends with a sense of homecoming, the choir singing British composer Bob Chilcott’s charming arrangement of the folksong, A Gift to be Simple, as choir members greet and embrace each other. Like the whole shapely programme, this ending is handled with beguiling lightness and an absence of mawkish sentimentality. The audience applauds, finally, gratefully acknowledging the special nature of the experience they have shared with the performers.
‘Horizons’, presented by Voices New Zealand, with Karen Grylls (Music Director), Jacqui Coats (Stage Director and Scriptwriter), Nathaniel Lees (Narrator) and Jeremy Fitzsimmons (Percussionist). Wellington, October 26-28, 2024.
You can read reviews of Voices NZ’s ‘When the Light Breaks’ (here) and ‘Mozart Reimagined’ (here).