The Age (Melbourne)
The following was
borrowed from
http://www.theage.com.au
Wednesday 12/10/2005
MELBOURNE FESTIVAL REVIEW
DIAMANDA GALAS : SONGS OF EXILE
Hamer Hall
October 10
John Slavin Reviewer
One of the most
extraordinary moments in Diamanda Galas' recital on Monday light was the
opening of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo's surrealist poem EPISTLE TO THE
TRANSIENTS, a topical lyric that describes in gut-wrenching physical
detail the experience of being a displaced person.
Galas sings it as a
recitative that grows into a powerful Goyaesque declamation about the
inevitability of extinction. But the introduction is a tripping little
rondo whose cuteness she transforms into a dance of death.
Death is the constant
traveling companion of this loosely connected sequence of songs from
French, Spanish. Italian, German, Italian, Turkish, and Greek sources.
Galas takes us on a
journey with the poet of each lyric who has suffered exile from his
homeland and whose exile is literally a descent into death. It is
emotionally satisfying that the cycle concludes with an all-out
expressive version of the traditional ballad SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT
CLEAN.
If there is a link that
gives Galas' performance coherence, it is the tradition of "amanedes."
The concluding "Aman!Aman!" to a song is the ancient sigh of fate,
grief, suffering across cultures that stretch from Greece to
Afghanistan. In Greek music it influenced rembetika, the
equivalent of the Blues that in the 1920s emerged out of the hash dens
of Asia Minor. Galas is thus coming home to her cultural roots.
But it is a tradition that
she challenges with an idiosyncratic form of musical surrealism. She
deliberately exaggerates the style in which each is sung to break open
her sophisticated technique in order to enter the zone of raw poetry.
She pushes her voice to extremes to make it crumble at the edges--the
way a flamenco singer does--so that at times it has the dissonance of a
rotting pianola in a bar south of some border.
Even familiar English
spirituals such as LET MY PEOPLE GO! are treated in an expressively
emphatic way to match style with content that makes the hair stand up on
the back of your neck.
Galas' brilliant
accompaniment evokes the rhythms of the exotic, the profane and the
doomed. Here Galas is a chameleon in a protean and lyrical performance
that escapes the sorrows of her themes. It is the work of a poet
exploring the dark side of experience.