Music review: Sjaella – Head & Heart
The acclaimed German female vocal ensemble Sjaella made a triumphant return visit to UKARIA.
Keen as ever to touch all musical bases, UKARIA has hosted two terrific choirs of late; the renowned UK group Voces8 came in 2023, and now it is the comparably top-notch female sextet Sjaella from Leipzig, Germany. Actually, they were also here two years ago, although if one missed them on that occasion, it was hardly possible to know what to expect.
Distinctive in so many ways, Sjaella do not fall into any stereotype. Unlike so many other choirs, they are undirected and no member of the ensemble takes a leading role. The six women breathe and sing together with a unity that is amazing — this is one of the first things one notices when hearing them.
Singers usually rely eye contact to do this, but Sjaella seem to find a deeper, organic sense of time and pulse that emanates from the music, and from within themselves.
The effect was especially telling in American composer David Lang’s ‘Head Heart’, an introspective piece of climbing harmonies and widely spaced phrases that are separated by long silences. The words, by poet Lydia Davis, confront the dilemma we face over loss, and pose the question: which is stronger, the thinking mind or the grieving heart?
With each piece tended to come a different answer. The sweet loveliness of Eleonora d’Este’s ‘Sicut lilium inter spinas’ (As the lily among thorns) suggested that comfort comes from the decision to overcome pain by a mental act of bringing oneself closer to the divine.
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In Renaissance polyphony, Sjaella have a unique sound. Being all-female, their sound floats like gossamer, and therein lies their main difference with Voces8. The latter are more solidly grounded with their combination of male and female voices.
These Germans, meanwhile, are ethereal. For sixteenth-century music, Sjaella are in a league by themselves. One did sense, though, that they were nine-tenths off their best to start with: UKARIA’s exceptionally clear but non-reverberant acoustic might have been short on comfort factor – for them, not the audience.
In Laura Marconi’s ‘Mein Grund, mein Puls’, their full intensity took hold. This quite stunning contemporary work has the voices descending in sliding pitches to the accompaniment of solitary ringing tones from glockenspiel. It seems to express a pathos where no hope can exist, except for contemplating the beauty of stillness after life has ceased.
In further motets of Heinrich Schütz and Melchior Franck, one started to wonder how these six singers dispose their voices across the usual ranges of soprano, alto, tenor and bass. Their solution is so interesting: some of their singers can reach down unusually low, covering much of the territory occupied by male voices. In particular, contralto Helene Erben executes this low end extremely capably, exhibiting a quality that, if not boasting outright power, is consistent with Sjaella’s special lightness.
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True to Lutheran principles, both Schütz and Franck tell us in their motets how salvation is obtained through devoutness but simultaneously through sensual pleasure. Set to the Song of Songs, a collection of love poetry in the Hebrew Bible, their texts are quite openly erotic. Sjaella don’t gloss over this racier stuff. They delight in all the senses, bringing verve and innocent joy to early music such as this. No longer is it to be enjoyed only for its cerebral beauty.
This German group began singing together when they were age 10 to 13, first calling themselves the Chickpeas; and key to understanding them is how they describe themselves as having “not lost a child-like experience of the world”.
They certainly come across as unregimented, as if external controls on self-expression have been completely lifted. The result is marvellous when they sing contemporary music. Caroline Shaw, another American composer, has written a wonderful evocation of birdsong in her Monteverdi-styled madrigal ‘Dolce cantavi’. In this the singers moved around on stage, their eyes tracking imaginary birds flitting across the stage and landing on the palms of their outstretched hands. It was brilliant.
Sjaella’s own composition, ‘Hypophysis’, narrates in amusing detail the hormonal changes that take place during the menstrual cycle and, acted out theatrically, it earnt numerous chuckles from the audience.
Sydney composer Alice Chance has written two equally entertaining pieces especially for the group, one of which, ‘Letterbox, is a of their past, present and future lives created from fictional letters written by Sjaella to themselves. Infinitely clever, it was only rivalled by the birdcall mayhem of her ‘Cockatoo Circus’ in the encore.
Sjaella are supreme in showing that chamber singing is not just about finessed purity but also about being in tune with the inner self.
This is a review Sjaella’s ‘Head & Heart’ on July 19 at UKARIA