Illuminate Women’s Music
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh - 8/2/25
Stephanie Lamprea (soprano), Jessica Kerr (cello)
Eight economical works by contemporary composers, an arrangement of a traditional Scottish folk song and one recast early twentieth century piece comprised the rich menu for this well-attended chamber concert at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery and Café – all brought together by the Illuminate Women’s Music project, as part of their 2024-5 touring series.
Dr Angela Elizabeth Slater, composer and initiator of Illuminate, introduced the evening and the performers. Her own My Skin: A Selkies Tale (2024) was featured in the second half of an adventurous but effectively communicative programme.
Sonia Allori’s The Goddess of Ballachullish, referencing a 2,500-year-old wooden carved effigy of a woman excavated from the peat shores of Loch Leven in the 1880s, opened the evening, with a text prepared by the composer. The heavy, dragging feel at the outset mirrors the digging up of the effigy, out of which emerges a strange and haunting beauty. A kind of ‘beautiful ugliness’, one might say. Kate Sagovsky’s A Note on Words for Wolf, by contrast, is all about the human voice cutting through instrumental distraction, and then weaving in and out of pitched and rhymical sounds and tones.
Sheena Phillip’s new arrangement of Taladh Criosda, a Gaelic song addressed to the Christ Child, took us back in time, before we were catapulted forward again into a quite different sound world by Puerto Rican composer (and multi-instrumentalist) Angélica Negrón’s Las Desaparecidas (2016), for cello and electronics. This featured vocal samples, found sounds and shifting rhythms in homage to many young girls abducted and trafficked from Mexico.
The final piece in the first half was award-winning Lithuanian composer Rūta Vitkauskaitė’s 16-minute Song of the Shadows, which brought the audience – inclusion this reviewer – into active, participative conversation with soprano and cello performers Stephanie Lamprea and Jessica Kerr, utilising invited soft vocal incursions and found instruments at the beginning and end of the piece. Evoking the haunting mystery of the Hebrides through Gaelic incantations and blessings, this part-hymn and part-sonic exploration created an enchanted circle of sound and resonance.
Simone Seales’ We Have Cried For So Long (2024) and Gemma MacGregor’s Marigold Blooming (2018), less than ten minutes together, opened the second half. The former comprises a moving poem and lament for those suffering in Palestine, Lebanon and Sudan, enfolded in sometimes voice-like and sometimes tech-inflected cello. The latter is a striking solo piece for soprano, based on an encounter with a woman on a bus journey, and using repetition and disturbed fragments of vocalisation to create an unsettling, intriguing and provocative atmosphere.
The longer My Skin: A Selkies Tale, lasting around 13 minutes, by Angela Elizabeth Slater, takes its inspiration from a mythical creature which can transform from seal to human through shedding its skin. The text is by Kendra Preston Leonard. The combination of voice and instrument by turns invites, propels, halts, projects and questions as it navigates us into a journey of discovery, unveiling, strength and endurance. A powerful piece.
The charming and evocative closer for the evening was Marie Dare’s song The Grey Geese (1902), arranged for soprano and cello by composer Amy Simpkin last year. Huge props must go to Stephanie Lamprea and Jessica Kerr for guiding and propelling us through a fascinating, challenging and inspiring evening of music making, and to Illuminate Women’s Music for curating an intimate chamber concert highlighting the deep resonance between the contemporary and the historic.
Illuminate Women’s Music: https://www.illuminatewomensmusic.co.uk
Simon Barrow is a writer, journalist, think-tank director and commentator whose musical interests span new music, classical, jazz, electronica and art rock. His book ‘Transfiguring the Everyday: The Musical Vision of Michael Tippett’ will be published by Siglum in 2025.
