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Snape Maltings, AldeburghNew music by Cassandra Miller, Newton Armstrong, Rebecca Saunders and Ryan Wigglesworth was brilliantly brought to life by Fraser and Roderick WilliamsTwo summers ago at the Aldeburgh festival, the soprano Juliet Fraser produced one of the most memorable musical events of the year, a solo performance of Samuel Beckett’s Not I and Morton Feldman’s Three Voices. For her concert at this year’s festival, Fraser was partnered by the composer and sound engineer Newton Armstrong in three works for voice and electronics, all of them specially composed for her. One, Cassandra Miller’s Tracery: Hardanger, was conceived during a residency at Snape in 2017; another was receiving its first performance, while the third was new to the UK.The world premiere was Armstrong’s The Book of the Sediments, one of four pieces commissioned by Fraser around the work of the marine biologist Rachel Carson. In this case it was Carson’s description of the millennia-long accumulations of sediments on the ocean floor that suggested the accumulating layers of Armstrong’s score, with the long, slowly shifting vocal lines overlaid on the electronically generated textures. Its glacial slowness was worlds away from the abrupt changes of direction in Rebecca Saunders’ The Mouth, a Beckett-like torrent of words and syllables flitting in and out of comprehensibility, as Fraser runs through her extraordinary repertoire of vocal techniques, supported and reinforced by an electronic soundtrack that is also derived from her voice. Continue reading...