REVIEWS of DALSTON SONGS

Migrants' hymn to their home
By Nick Kimberley, Evening Standard 02.05.08
Half-hidden between Hoxton and Stoke Newington, Dalston lacks their cachet but as its overflowing greengrocers' stalls and flower shops testify, it has its own off-colour glamour. What used to be a pie-andeel shop is now a Chinese restaurant; what will it be next?
The composer Helen Chadwick lives in the area and pays it a moving tribute in Dalston Songs. Her source material is interviews with local, mostly immigrant residents. Some are refugees, others reject the label but for all of them the notion of "home" is complex, confused, deeply felt. Chadwick weaves their words into her libretto but also uses their actual voices, their richly accented English providing the foundation of her "a capella theatre song cycle".
Not quite an opera, then, nor a ballet, although both forms are just a whisker away; Chadwick herself co-directs with choreographer Steven Hoggett. The setting is an authentically Dalstonian caff where four women make a song and dance out of choosing coffee; later they are joined by four men, one a loner, the others glued to their mobiles. Little by little they reveal themselves through the words they sing and the moves they make.
Most of the singers are British, and deliver Chadwick's half-folk, half-classical vocal lines cleanly but with feeling. A rougher, perhaps tougher counterpoint comes from Soraya Mahdaoui, a Berber, and Nawroz Oramari, whose extraordinary Kurdish yodel pierces the heart. Not that everything is pain and anguish; a joyous paean to mashed potato makes sure of that.

Dalston Songs Reviewed by: Kenneth Carter www.classicalsource.com
This work is rooted in Dalston - a particular locality. It is the testimony of people who live there - people for whom travelling into Highbury, Canonbury or Hackney involves leaving home-territory and circulating in a foreign land. But many of these inhabitants of Dalston began their lives in Turkey, in Ireland, in Serbia.
The scene is a café in Dalston. It is bare. The furniture is cheap and characterless. Yet the walls are rich in tawdry posters depicting food, ranging eloquently and internationally from mashed potato to kebabs.
The café is a meeting-place - a meeting-by-chance place, where bonding-through-circumstance occurs between people who have nowhere else to go. The people make the café international. Equally, they make the café a writhing complex of lives that used to be lived elsewhere, a centre for trying to contact nearest and dearest living continents away.
The basic sounds of "Dalston Songs" are taped interviews with local inhabitants who narrate their stories in matter-of-fact tones, accented from various elsewheres: the Jew who escaped the Nazis, the grown-up son of unnamed nationality whose mother would not speak to him until he had satisfactorily identified himself to her by accurately describing a large mole on a particular part of his body.
The Helen Chadwick Group performed these songs in an immaculate a cappella. The purity of the simple melodies, as well as the clarity of diction and unerring balance and intonation of the performers, gave the music a timeless quality while providing a committed, secular descant to the appalling, sad stories that the speakers had to tell.
Most songs followed after one or more interviews. Some depicted moments being passed in the café - the exiles' present. The women sang about coffee and dust; the men about preferring mashed potato to other foods (and to women). Some songs expressed larger questions, too great for the interviewees to express in their halting English, while others poured forth in counterpoint to the spoken words of an interview with the song generally having precedence, the sad, spoken tones acting as a sotto voce ground-bass.
The performing format was simple. We began with the four women. The melodies sat comfortably, mostly in the middle range of their voices - two lower voices and two somewhat higher, harmonising agreeably and variedly. There was occasional counterpoint and a hint of canon - ingratiating and welcome. The men introduced themselves with 'Mint Tea'; with 'Card game' they used their hands and matchboxes to accompany themselves in lively syncopation. On the whole, their melodies were simpler still and their sounds often came close to humming, soft like suave barbers. Later, women and men came together. Soraya Mahdaoui and Nawroz Oramarî, at different times, gave us something of the Eastern Mediterranean, gently electrifying. Despite her efforts to be merely one amongst others, Helen Chadwick was mesmerising. The cool, low timbre of her voice was timeless. Her movements and gestures had the gravity, definition and grace of a woman from Java.
The performance seemed a little over-long, but I had no wish to break the spell. On several occasions, I thought it was about to end; at first, I viewed this as a defect in devising the show, expecting a sorrowful, resounding climax with no levity to follow. Then I realised that the somewhat rambling structure was in fact a wonderfully true and evocative depiction of the Dalston people's lives. We were witnessing a rich, undulating interplay of harrowing memories, present guffaws, physical relish, pained longing, the respite of a roof over one's head and the offer of contact, such as it might be, from one's fellow human beings.

OTHER REVIEW CLIPS

"Chadwick…an exquisite find"
THE GUARDIAN

"Coming across this independently produced Helen Chadwick album in a pile of lacklustre big label releases is like finding an exquisitely hand-crafted bowl in a shop full of tourist tat…..Here compositions bear comparison with the best contemporary composers…..
Give this woman a Prom"
THE GUARDIAN

"Chadwick proved the most sympathetic writer for the voice
DAILY TELEGRAPH

"The hall was galvanised when Chadwick and co delivered a series of short songs"
THE INDEPENDENT (about the Royal Opera House concert Jan 06)

"the most original and amusing……………
Helen Chadwick's terrific short opera"
THE OBSERVER

"The wickedly talented Helen Chadwick has done it again"
WOMEN IN MUSIC

"Helen Chadwick orchestrates a haunting evening….…..exceptional"
SCENE

"Helen Chadwick revives the ancient art of storytelling
through song…. Hers is the storyteller's gift of enchantment"
CADUCEUS

"The concert was unbelievably strong and far exceeded my expectations. Wonderful music and ideas, presented with passion and intelligence.
Helen achieved extraordinary things with this illuminating project, which combined powerful ideas,
music and movement with intimacy and style.
It was a real tour de force evening of brilliance and passion."
BRADLEY HEMMINGS-GREENWICH FESTIVAL DIRECTOR

"......a fresh inspiring sound devoid both of a hard sell and self-absorbed clichés"
STROUD NEWS AND JOURNAL

"The despair in Melanie Pappenheim's song of fear and grief, and later in her search for news of her lost children, couldn't fail to move"
THE INDEPENDENT
On songs composed by Helen for English Touring Opera's THE HOUSE ON THE MOON

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