This past Saturday March 30th at 7pm in Baird Recital Hall on the University at Buffalo’s North Campus, Voces Jessie Downs and Julia Anne Cordani performed an excerpt of Alex Huddleston‘s “The Sonnets”at the 2019 Buffalo Music Graduate Student Conference. “The Sonnets” was one of Sotto Voce’s first commissioned work from our Spring 2018 season.
The duet that Jessie and Julia presented features intense registral leaps and undulating harmonies from this dramatic work’s grand finale, set to the fragmented text, “What was I looking at, not to see the wetness spread?” and the exclamation, “Water!” As many of Huddleston’s works, this piece seems to capture of the intensely disturbing beauty of the suffering split self. The full work consists of several “movements” like this one, that overlap and juxtapose different materials as performed by subsets of the full vocal sextet, as well as a noisy fixed electronics part. You can hear the full version of “The Sonnets” as we performed it in Cleveland last summer on our “Living Voices” tour through the link below.
Although the Voces do not have a spring concert planned as per usual, we are in the process of workshopping exciting materials for both a new opera and a new mass by current and former Voce composers. Further details about these upcoming presentations will be released shortly, so stay tuned!
Sotto Voce 