Zverohra (Kryštof Mařatka)
(Animals at play)
is a logical sequel to my earlier work for large symphony orchestra Otisk (Imprint), Palaeolithic deposit of pre-instrumental music (2004), which presents a utopian vision of the origins of music with instrumental sounds from the Palaeolithic era some 50,000 years ago. Zverohra removes this mirror even further in time: the piece reflects the phenomenon of the earliest vocal expressions and language development of our remote ancestors.
The fundamental idea of Zverohra rests upon the interaction between the sound universe of animals, its imitation and the acquisition of its own potential by the human voice. A continuous flow of instrumental but mainly vocal elements supports the architecture of the piece, which is nothing but a segmented ritual, made to resemble discovery of the communicational possibilities through sound at the dawn of the human species. The piece evokes primitive vocal expressions of the first hominidae who, apart from their gestures, begin to discover other possibilities of communication: a complex whole of vocal sounds to which they assign concrete meanings.
Commission of the Festival Présences of Radio France and the Prague Premieres Festival.
Kryštof Mařatka
Zverohra by Kryštof Mařatka is a vocal concerto for soprano and orchestra. The work’s duration is ca. 20 minutes. I performed this work in 2008 in Prague and later in Paris; in March 2011, I went back to it in Katowice.
All three concerts were conducted by the composer. After speaking to Kryštof in Katowice, I promised to send him this short commentary that I wrote down after the Prague premiere.
As someone who is passionate about contemporary vocal music, performing many so-called “risky“ works, I would like to explain this term which is both imprecise and unfounded. In the domain of vocal music, risk is inversely proportional to the technical level reached by a singer. Out of sheer honesty towards one’s own voice, it makes no sense to take up a score that would merely exploit your vocal apparatus with a range of novel ideas, often amusing and theatrical: nasal, subglottal, velar, shouted, whispered, rough sounds, mixing parlato and cantando, sounds of animals and humans, singing of birds and quack of ducks, effects of roughness with emphasised vibrato, pianissimo senza vibrato attacks, to mention but a part of an extraordinary panorama of subtle vocal means that are called for in this unprecedented vocal concerto. There is indeed no precedent in such richness of vocal “affects“, those written out and those merely implicit, sometimes introduced serially in short improvisations, testimonies of a great sound culture, imagination and a passion for glossolalic fun.
I wish to emphasise this ludic aspect of contemporary vocal creation, especially the tendency to play with one’s mouth, palate, and the whole vocal apparatus – elements crucial to the vocal music of Kryštof Mařatka. Failing to take real pleasure in this play, designed so creatively and inventively in the case of this work, the singer should not take the challenge of this score, as they won’t be able to achieve the necessary illusion of technical easiness.
The challenge is to create, when singing, an impression of obviousness, that everything happens by itself; that allows to show the musical texture in its entire beauty. It is a real obsession of mine. The singer on stage should serve the music, not make use of it.
Technical issues in the performance of Zverohra
1. The middle low register acquires a dark timbre here, close to a male parlato. Let us remind that classical singing technique requires that the middle low register have a bright, light timbre.
2. The middle high register is sung apertoin the rendering of bird voices, staccatos and the prolonged high A flat, which is followed by quick Oriental-like melismas. In classical singing technique, the middle high register should be performed coperto.
3. The wide range (from D4 to a high Db6) requires an economic voice emission and a linear use of the voice. Yet the numerous parlato fragments stand in contradiction with the fluency typical of the classical technique and require that the voice be used unsparingly, with equal intensity throughout the tessitura, so as to reinforce the sound volume and the different utterances in the vocal “arguments“.
4. The score includes different vocal “affects“. I recommend that they be thor oughly examined beforehand, which will facilitate their performance, because the work’s tempo is very variable. For example the final coda, from bar 281 until the end of the work, includes no fewer than 18 affects.
I strongly advocate programming fragments of Zverohra into vocal competitions. The methodology of working on that piece in public masterclasses would make it easier to master the technical difficulties of the score. Zverohra is, after all, a stage work, encouraging the performer to become an actor and not only a singer.
Elena Vassilieva
