Music in Drumcliffe
St Columba’s Church, Co Sligo
…The German singer Salome Kammer is not just a singer but an actress, too, and as well as songs intended for singing actresses by Kurt Weill, she included Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III (intended for a singer who could act) and some sound poems by German Dadaist Hugo Ball (intended, presumably, for anyone courageous enough to take them on).
…It seemed a pity that Kammer’s Weill had to be heard in arrangements with string quartet by Steffen Schleiermacher.
The trademark of Weill’s work in the 1920s and 1930s was his absorption of popular idioms – he actually managed the rare feat of becoming a classic in both popular and classical worlds. The intrusive artiness of Schleiermacher’s arrangements totally undermined the character of Weill’s musical achievement.
Kammer’s performances of poems from Ball’s 1916 Laut- und Klanggedichte were quite simply a tour-de-force. She didn’t just make stanzas like “elomen elomen lefitalominal/wolminuscalo/baumbala bunga/acycam glastula feirofim flinsi” sound persuasive, she actually made them sound riveting. As she said to the audience after she had introduced the poems, “Anyway, you will understand it.” And she was right.
She was equally engrossing in Hildegard von Bingen’s Quam pretiosa and in the inversion of normal singing and concert behaviour that is Sequenza III…
(MICHAEL DERVANT The Irish Times, 04.05.2011)
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