Diamanda Galas casts her spell

Diamanda Galas
Royal Festival Hall, London
Rating ****

Andrew Clements
Guardian

Saturday September 22, 2001


Diamanda Galas doesn't so much blur the boundaries between jazz, blues, folk, country and western, rock and experimental music as trample all over them. The audience for her Festival Hall appearance reveals how successfully she has overcome the usual fixed categorisations: all human life seems to be present, from an elderly priest to a young couple with enough piercings to give any metal detector a fatal seizure.

Galas is in town to showcase her latest project, La Serpenta Canta, which brings together a polyglot collection of her own songs and standards that she has appropriated and transformed. Theatrically the show is simple enough - Galas in black, starkly spotlit at her piano, with just a few changes of colour and the occasional back projection - but acoustically it's more complicated. The close-miked piano sound is constantly transformed electronically, overlaid with echo and delay, and the prodigious range of Galas's voice, every whisper and every scream, is projected and treated too.

But this is no slickly planned, hi-tech, Laurie Anderson-style package. Galas's songs are raw material in every sense of the words, the basis for wild, passionate excursions, in which the relationship between the singer and her accompaniment is utterly symbiotic: the piano provides the musical foundation and her voice the expressive envelope. The music is garnered from all quarters. One introduction is cod Rachmaninov, another turns Chopin's funeral march into a blues piece. A straightforward 12-bar blues gets smothered in a forest of trills, stride piano rhythms suddenly melt electronically and lose all their impetus.

On top of all that is the voice, which always seems to be aspiring for something transcendentally extreme. An increasingly frantic version of I Put a Spell on You ends in a babble of scat singing, while Dead Cat on the Line, launched over what could be an exercise for the left hand, becomes ever more surreal. But it is Galas's own setting of Paul Celan's Todesfugue, obsessively chanted while the piano darts and shivers in the highest registers, that provides the most extraordinary moment, when one realises that sheltering beneath all the carefully calculated hauteur and musical shock tactics is a deeply serious and accomplished artist.