Poems of Sheer Nothingness

Featuring performances from Grammy-­winning soprano Susan Narucki with New York’s acclaimed Talea Ensemble, Poems of Sheer Nothingness presents world premiere recordings of vocal music by American composer Aaron Helgeson, introducing two new works that combine ancient poetry with music of the here and now. The first, “Poems of sheer nothingness,” presents a song cycle commissioned by Narucki based on the poetry of early French troubadours and sung in their original Occitan, a beautiful yet almost forgotten romance language now revived in five intimate chamber settings for soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. The second, “Notes on a page (of Sappho),” offers a musical reincarnation for soprano and eleven instruments of poetic fragments by provocative and erotic Greek poet Sappho in an English translation by Canadian poet Anne Carson. Both works feature archaic song texts whose once-florid music is now lost, leaving Helgeson’s surreal and evocative sonic imagination and Narucki’s subtly expressive voice to fill in the gaps made by the decay of time and memory. The result is a collection of vocal music that simultaneously once was, and could be again.

Poems of Sheer Nothingness is the first portrait recording of music by Aaron Helgeson, an Oregon­-born composer now living in Ohio where he is currently on faculty at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Influenced as much by the likes of painter René Magritte, playwright Harold Pinter and magicians Penn & Teller as his composer forebears, Helgeson describes his work as “attempting to capture the bizarre beauty of sounds from everyday life (some musical, some not yet) by re-imagining them on acoustic instruments.” Along with recent projects including songs based on words spoken by characters in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and a symphonic transcription of accounts associated with the Children’s Blizzard of 1888, Poems of Sheer Nothingness follows Helgeson’s interest in revisiting historical works and events that were once full of sound and music but left no aural record.

Susan Narucki’s commitment to and excellence in performing contemporary American music won her a Grammy Award in 2001 for her part in George Crumb’s Star Child, and a nomination in 2003 for her CD of Elliott Carter’s Tempo e Tempi, and she has a long history of recording work by important American composers like Charles Ives, Aaron Jay Kernis and Mario Davidovsky. She appears alongside the Talea Ensemble, a “vital part of the New York contemporary ­classical scene” (New York Times), conducted by James Baker.