Review Feshareki / BBC Singers / Goddard – Goddard-inspired soundscape stuck in the great unknown | classical music

SHaifa Vachariki’s The Divine Feminine is many things, but this latest work by the award-winning British-Iranian composer and turntable player is not an opera, as it has been described. Premiered at St Martin-in-the-Fields, transforming the nave, gallery and sanctuary of a central London church into an intricately amplified “360-degree soundscape”, Divine Feminine could serve as an installation, a piece of musical theatre, or even a therapy session. What it isn’t is an urgent story committed solely to being told through song.

This is not stylistic gatekeeping. Terminology is important – if only because it creates a frame of reference and useful expectations. Art loses its energy if it has no solid structure from which it can bounce, no walls from which it can be measured or dismantled. As it was, this meditative celebration of the Divine Feminine—a concept not clearly defined here, but a Sun Salutation performed at the nexus of fertility and sisterhood, rebirth and the energy of the Goddess—chanted and shouted and stamped and danced, but it never found its focus.

Poet Karen McCarthy Woolf’s text – less a written text than a series of poems, some sung, most spoken – tells the story of the Celtic goddess Brigid. With the help of a group of worldly gods and teenage Snowdrop (we know she’s deadly due to her “cool e-cigarette” and her use of expressions like “OMG” and “kick ass”), she must smash the patriarchy and summon the return of spring. Not bad for an hour of work.

Soprano Emma Tring’s Brigid was flamboyant and spunky, throwing herself over shrill cries and singing Irish-style folk tunes with the same rooted force – a voice now sweet, now husky with primal energy. They were bravely backed by the upper voices of the BBC Singers and the young singers from Vox Next Gen, all conducted by Lucy Goddard, plus Feshareki herself on turntable and electric guitar (she bowed, not played), manipulating the sound in real time.

But what does it all add up to? You can’t get past what’s not there, and that’s the real problem with a piece whose eyes and ears are fixed in the sky, but whose musical feet never find the ground. If we remove the digital illusion, we’re left with a bunch of clustered strings, a ballad and some hymns. This is not enough.