Nadja
Nadja (2015) for soprano and string quartet
Texts by AlfredTennyson, Ovin, and André Breton
Instrumentation: Soprano and string quartet
Duration: ca. 25 minutes
Premiere date/venue: March 11, 2015, The Italian Academy, NYC
Premiere performers: The MIVOS quartet with Kate Soper, soprano
Album: The Garden of Diverging Paths, New Focus Records, released June 16, 2016 (also includes works byTaylor Brook and Andrew Greenwald).
Program Note
Nadja explores the scorching, preposterous, inspiring and/or incomprehensible heights of feminine love and lust as experienced by both its host and quarry, along with the possibly-not-inevitable task of a soprano amidst instrumentalists to do all the emoting.
I. The protagonist of Tennyson’s poem “Fatima” pours out her devotion in metaphors derived from Sappho.
II. Ovid tells the story of the nymph Echo who could only speak by echoing the words of others, and who fell disastrously in love with the unfeeling Narcissus (violin I).
III. The title character intervenes from her place in the surrealist novel by André Breton, who for a period of ten days compulsorily follows his heroine through her reality, “reality that was lying at Nadja’s feet like a lapdog.”
“The most exquisite element of Wet Ink co-director Kate Soper’s Nadja is her fluid entwining of the voice and strings. A heady meditation on feminine love and lust, Soper as soprano often merges timbres with the instrumentalists here, pitch-bending and pitch-leaping with agility and finesse. The texts of Tennyson, Ovid, and Breton shiver with desire as bleary textures buoy sometimes tone-row-resembling vocal melodies…or all five coalesce to embolden the text…or all five erupt in erotic hunger. It is a stand-out work…”
WQXR (full review)
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