Composer Kate Soper releases The Hunt, a one act chamber opera inspired by a series of medieval tapestries known as "The Lady and the Unicorn." The work is scored for three sopranos who also play instruments onstage (violin and ukulele), and incorporates some of Soper's characteristic compositional interests, such as the use of diegetic music, into this intimate staging.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 55:48 | ||
| 01 | Prologue: de Monoceron | Prologue: de Monoceron | 2:16 |
| 02 | Livestream #1: Day Seventeen | Livestream #1: Day Seventeen | 1:26 |
| 03 | King’s Comment #1 | King’s Comment #1 | 0:47 |
| 04 | Riddle #1 (a violin and bow) | Riddle #1 (a violin and bow) | 0:52 |
| 05 | On the Unicorn | On the Unicorn | 2:56 |
| 06 | First Sighting | First Sighting | 0:46 |
| 07 | Rue’s Solo | Rue’s Solo | 2:28 |
| 08 | Livestream #2: Day Forty-Three | Livestream #2: Day Forty-Three | 1:29 |
| 09 | King’s Comment #2 | King’s Comment #2 | 0:42 |
| 10 | Riddle #2 (virginity) | Riddle #2 (virginity) | 1:08 |
| 11 | Maiden-Song | Maiden-Song | 3:38 |
| 12 | Second Sighting | Second Sighting | 0:44 |
| 13 | Briar’s Solo | Briar’s Solo | 2:33 |
| 14 | Livestream #3: Day Eighty-Two | Livestream #3: Day Eighty-Two | 1:30 |
| 15 | The Noble Unicorn | The Noble Unicorn | 1:48 |
| 16 | Fleur’s Solo | Fleur’s Solo | 2:47 |
| 17 | Livestream #4: Day Ninety-Eight | Livestream #4: Day Ninety-Eight | 1:39 |
| 18 | King’s Comment #3 | King’s Comment #3 | 3:28 |
| 19 | Troubadour Song | Troubadour Song | 5:27 |
| 20 | Riddle #3 | Riddle #3 | 1:36 |
| 21 | Sugar Song | Sugar Song | 3:41 |
| 22 | Third Sighting | Third Sighting | 1:55 |
| 23 | Not Honey | Not Honey | 5:34 |
| 24 | Livestream #5: Day Ninety-Nine | Livestream #5: Day Ninety-Nine | 1:25 |
| 25 | Riddle #4 (an onion) | Riddle #4 (an onion) | 0:44 |
| 26 | Coda: de Monoceron | Coda: de Monoceron | 2:29 |
During a visit to Paris in 2016, composer Kate Soper saw an exhibit featuring the series of medieval tapestries known as “The Lady and the Unicorn.” In their pictorial storytelling, the tapestries recount a legend that says that the way to catch a unicorn is to lure it with a virgin maiden: once it is lulled by her purity, the unicorn becomes vulnerable to capture by nearby hunters. Finding resonance between this antiquated story and society’s contemporary controversies surrounding control over and exploitation of women’s bodies, Soper was compelled to write a short story about the experience of being unicorn bait. During pandemic quarantine, passing the time with a ukulele and 10th century riddles, she turned that story into a series of video diaries, and then motets, and later, a staged chamber opera for the intimate forces of three sopranos self-accompanying on ukulele and violin.
The result is The Hunt, an opera for three performers that manages to glide through myriad stylistic territory, convey a multi-dimensional narrative, and offer a stark critique of historical and contemporary ideas of sexuality and gender all in one act. The stripped-down instrumentation evokes troubadour culture: three singing musicians, traveling with portable instruments, bringing their tale to attentive listeners. Soper goes beyond the era-appropriate musical allusion however, mining the unique instrumentation for echoes of ironic music theatre (in the “Livestream” update movements), indie folk (track 5 “On the Unicorn”, track 11 “Maiden Song”), homophonic three-part chorales (track 3 “King’s Comment”), parlor song (track 4 “Riddle #1” and track 10 “Riddle #2”), and avant-garde vocal textures that dip into the absurd (track 21 “Sugar Song”). The structure of the piece rotates through these livestream updates, riddles, songs, comments, and solos, forming a kind of cyclical ritual to the way the story unfolds.
Read MoreThe opening “Prologue: de Monoceron,” with Latin and English text taken from medieval bestiaries, is an annunciation for the three high voices a cappella, playing with counterpoint that snakes in and out of consonant sonorities and unstable intervals. The virgins admonish that “The unicorn can’t be taken alive!” Unless… it is soothed by a virgin maiden. “Livestream #1: Day Seventeen” introduces the temporal slide between the medieval and contemporary worlds, and begins to lay out the plot of the opera. A texture featuring violin glissandi and ukulele strums accompanies an informational mini-aria in a format that Soper returns to several times throughout the piece, as the days and weeks accumulate and the tension grows.
The three “King’s Comments” are scored for the three voices with supporting electronic drone accompaniment. The drone undergoes a kind of ominous disintegration in each, but particularly in the extended “King’s Comment #3”, as the text describes a potentially fatal surgery to restore virginal purity if “any blot of sin” is found to be keeping the virgins from completing their job.
The "songs" feature the ukulele as the anchor instrument, strumming and arpeggiating rhythmic figures that frame the folk style in which they are written. In “On the Unicorn,” a strange text by medieval poet and composer Hildegard of Bingen is set to an angular meter and cheerfully dissonant harmony, producing delightfully irregular phrases. In contrast, “Maiden-Song,” with text by Christina Rossetti, is a steady dirge, as a regular strumming pattern in the ukulele and harmonics in the violin provide the foundation for responsive singing between the three voices.
The three "solos" each present one of the characters' inner thoughts, as represented by the works of symbolist poet H.D. Here, the other two singers provide repetitive, haunting background textures as each virgin in turn expresses feelings of frustration, whether tinged with impatience, longing, or rage.
The instrumental writing is not without its corners and turns. In “The Noble Unicorn”, violinist Hirona Amamiya tears off sul ponticello virtuosic lines over moto perpetuo arpeggios in Christiana Cole’s ukulele. Cole’s accompaniment in “Troubadour Song” traffics in intricately shifting duple and triple groupings, while Amamiya comments on the vocal line with poignant melodic phrases. Amamiya has an extended, seductive solo violin introduction to “Not Honey,” before the ukulele establishes a simple modal figure.
“Sugar Song” and “Third Sighting” break through the formalism and propriety of the repeating movements, and lead the listener into a surreal, internal world. “Sugar Song” features a panoply of wordless extended vocal techniques that spill over into laughter; the virgins, at their emotional limit after months of increasing threat and degradation, have thrown caution to the wind and embarked on a hallucinogen-driven out of body experience. “Third Sighting” opens with a sonic vision, as the unicorn finally appears – a halo of voices saturated with reverb and processing gives way to a cinematic audio image of a hunting party, with gunshots, dogs, and horses, and finally closes with a layered texture of modular, repetitive sung and spoken texts as the virgins process this incredible event separately and together. After this cognitive break in the progression of the piece, Soper brings us back to song with the sensual “Not Honey,” in which the virgins enact their plan to protect the unicorn by secretly losing their virginities, and a final “livestream” and “riddle”. Finally, the piece returns to the text and annunciatory quality of the Prologue in the “Coda: de Monoceron." This time, there is no caveat attached to the key phrase. “The unicorn can’t be taken alive” -- and by extension, neither can the no-longer-virgins. The text from the prologue has been transformed into a battle cry: although we do not know what will happen to the characters after the opera ends, they have found collective strength in the determination to claim their autonomy, and to keep a magical creature from senseless destruction.
– Dan Lippel & Kate Soper
Kate Soper, book & music
Mila Henry, music director
Hirona Amamiya, soprano & violin
Christiana Cole, soprano & ukulele
Brett Umlauf, soprano & ukulele (ukulele on tracks 20, 25 & 26)
Recorded October 16 & 17, 2023 by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio
Edited, mixed & mastered by Ryan Streber
Music directed by Mila Henry
Photos by Rob Davidson for Miller Theatre at Columbia University
Layout & design by Kate Gentile
Kate Soper (composer/librettist) has been hailed by The Boston Globe as “a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power” and by The New Yorker as “one of the great originals of her generation.” A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Kate is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Rome. Praised by The New York Times for her “lithe voice and riveting presence,” she performs frequently as a vocalist. Kate’s previous operas include Here Be Sirens (2014), IPSA DIXIT (2017), and The Romance of the Rose (2023). She is a co-director and vocalist for Wet Ink, a new music ensemble dedicated to adventurous music-making across aesthetic boundaries.
Mila Henry (music director) is a conductor, pianist and music director who maintains a versatile career, spanning folk operas to rock musicals to reimagined classics. Hailed “a stalwart contributor to the contemporary opera scene” (Opera Ithaca), she has collaborated with The American Opera Project, Beth Morrison Projects, HERE, Opera Philadelphia, PROTOTYPE and VisionIntoArt, at venues ranging from The Apollo to the Library of Congress to Dutch National Opera. Mila holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and Elizabethtown College, and was nicknamed a “Jill of all trades” (Sullivan County Democrat) for her multi- instrumentalist work with The Opera Cowgirls.
Soprano and violinist Hirona Amamiya (“Rue”, violin) captivates audiences with her versatility. From baroque to contemporary, her operatic triumphs range from “Cleopatra” in Giulio Cesare to “Zerlina” in Don Giovanni, “Sandman” in Hansel and Gretel, “Tsering” in Ga Sho, and “Rue” in The Hunt. A Carnegie Hall soloist, she also brings her warmth and precision to ensembles like the Bard Festival Chorale and New York Chamber Orchestra. Born in Tokyo, Ms. Amamiya embraces her dual musical identity, weaving vocal artistry with the elegance of the violin.
Christiana Cole (“Briar”, ukulele) is a performer, teacher, writer, and Austin, Texas native, now in NYC/NJ. BM in Classical Voice: Manhattan School of Music. Previous roles include “Susan” in Harriet Tubman opera by Nkeiru Okoye, at American Opera Projects. Originated the role of “Lauren” in Sir Elton John’s original musical The Devil Wears Prada. Studio singer for Philip Glass (Alice; Circus Days and Nights). Featured on the soundtrack of Sundance hit film The Farewell, score by Alex Weston. Christie is so grateful for this beautiful piece of art. It has healed, challenged, and changed them. Christie teaches voice lessons and writes musicals.
Soprano Brett Umlauf (“Fleur”, ukulele) spotlights women composers’ earliest and newest works with her “pealing, focused sound” and “luminous yet earthy” performances (The New York Times). In the same year she originated the role of Soper’s “Fleur”, she completed a Greek-Turkish Fulbright fellowship, walking in 9th-c. hymnographer Kassia of Byzantium’s footsteps for her project Hazelnut Road: Vows of Stability, Acts of Mobility. Brett is co-founder of SUORE Project, a trio celebrating nun composers, and was a longtime principal artist at Morningside Opera, Company XIV and SIREN Baroque. The Swedish Institute, American Scandinavian Society and Swedish Women’s Educational Association have awarded her work.
Today’s composers are a great deal more likely to use vocal works to make sociopolitical points – even when they reach well into the past for inspiration. Some composers can do this quite cleverly, one such being Kate Soper (born 1981), whose chamber opera The Hunt is packed with contemporary approaches and sensibilities that are unlikely to sustain over the long term but do not appear to have any such concerns, staying focused on the here-and-now in a kind of forced philosophical manner. The Hunt – which happens to have 26 sections, although the number has no significance – is unusual in design, using three sopranos to tell the story and having each of them play an instrument instead of being accompanied by a separate ensemble. This is diegetic music – that is, the on-stage performers play pieces within the context of the work and can themselves hear the music, thus “breaking” a kind of “fourth wall” of sound as they participate in a narrative, and are aware that they do so, even as they function as characters within it. This and other sensibilities of The Hunt are quite contemporary in nature, even though the work was inspired by medieval tapestries illustrating the hunt for a unicorn through the use of a virgin as bait: lured by purity, the unicorn approaches and can then be captured by hunters. Soper, unsurprisingly for a modern composer, chooses to use the old legend as the basis of a critique of societal attitudes toward gender and sexuality, thus deliberately denying the tale any level of universality that it might otherwise have. She does employ a mixture of styles, including folk and chorale and parlor song and musical theater, and she even uses a mixture of Latin and English to establish the opening scene. Her musical language is unabashedly contemporary: hearing Latin homophony declaimed in strong dissonance with overlays of Sprechstimme is at the very least an intriguing experience. The verbiage (most of it also by Soper, with bits by Christina Rossetti and symbolist poet Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D.) is often self-consciously self-aware, and the vocal techniques tend to make much of the argument difficult to follow even when the underlying music itself is modest in scale. The Huntis an intriguingly experimental bit of avant-garde sort-of-opera, with some elements of genuine creativity (for instance, the voices in First Sighting speak so rapidly over each other that they sound like electronics, while those voices’ high level of clarity in The Noble Unicorn creates a brief Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque moment). The presentational quirkiness of this (+++) release is actually its most attractive element. It does undermine the intended seriousness of the messages that Soper wants to communicate, but that is perhaps all to the good, since the structure and sound of The Hunt are more unusual and innovative than the rather formulaic meanings it seeks to convey.
— Mark Estren, 4.19.2024
New Focus Recordings is an artist led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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