Shiva Feshareki’s Divine Feminine is many things, but this latest work from the multi-award-winning British-Iranian composer and turntablist is not, as billed, an opera. Premiered at St Martin-in-the-Fields, transforming the nave, gallery and sanctuary of the central London church into an intricately amplified “360° soundscape”, Divine Feminine might be an installation, a piece of music-theatre, even a therapy session. What it’s not is a story urgently and solely committed to being told through song.
This isn’t stylistic gatekeeping. Terminology matters – if only because it creates a useful frame of reference and expectation. Art loses energy if it has no solid architecture to bounce off, no walls to scale or dismantle. As it was, this meditative celebration of the divine feminine – a concept never explicitly defined here, but doing sun salutations at the nexus of fecundity and sisterhood, rebirth and goddess-energy – chanted and shouted and stamped and danced, but never found its focus.
Poet Karen McCarthy Woolf’s text – not so much a libretto as a sequence of poems, some sung, most spoken – tells the story of Celtic goddess Brigid. With the aid of a grimoire of global goddesses and teenager Snowdrop (we know she’s mortal by her “cool cherry vape” and her use of expressions like “OMG” and “kick arse”) she must smash the patriarchy and summon the return of spring. Not bad for an hour’s work.
Soprano Emma Tring was an incandescent, fearless Brigid, hurling herself at keening cries and lilting Irish-style folk tunes with the same rooted power – voice now sweet, now hoarse with primal energy. She was gamely supported by the upper voices of the BBC Singers and young singers from Vox Next Gen, all conducted by Lucy Goddard, as well as Feshareki herself on turntable and electric guitar (bowed, not strummed), manipulating the sound in real time.
But what did it all add up to? You can’t transcend what’s not there, and that’s the real problem with a piece whose eyes and ears are fixed on heaven, but whose musical feet never find the ground. Take away the digital illusion and we’re left with a handful of cluster chords, a folk song and some chanting. It’s not enough.