The New York Times

MUSIC REVIEW

An Encyclopedia of Voices,
Human and Otherwise

The New York Times

By Anne Midgette

What does a voice look like? On Thursday night at the Kitchen, a voice shimmered across a sheet of metal foil, casting a halo of fog from the singer's breath across the blurred reflection of her face, while its amplified sound left a ripple of metallic whispers in its wake.

The piece is called "Voci," Italian for voices, and in it Pamela Z, a classically trained singer and performance artist, showcases just about every aspect of how and what a human voice looks, sounds, feels, means. The evening-length work, which had its New York premiere this week, was called an opera, but in fact it was a series of set pieces and skits - some abstract and beautiful, some very funny - examining different aspects of the term voice: the voices you hear in your head, the recorded voices of answering machines, the voices of musical instruments and so on. In fact, a roster of different kinds of voices, iterated like Homer's catalog of ships by a trio of Ms. Z's, both live and on video, formed the core of the evening's final episode.

Ms. Z, a well-known figure on the international contemporary music circuit, is a wonderfully compelling performer with a lot of range. Wired with a device touted in the program as a BodySynth, which translates a performer's gestures into manipulations of sound, she pushed her performance to the edge of dance with hand and arm movements that created clicks, tones or, in one number, bird songs. Singing a note into a microphone, she electronically repeated it and altered it and sang in duet with it until she had created a layered soundscape, an ensemble made only of herself, sounding now like a baby's cry, now like the song of a bird, now like a disapproving superego, now simply like a trained singer in full cry.

Then, changing the mood altogether, she left the stage and allowed a video to take over for part of a very funny dialogue involving a man calling an answering machine that talks back. ("I detect a note of sarcasm in your response. If you would like to continue this conversation, press or say 1.")

Another angle involved the mechanics of creating the voice, specifically through classical vocal training. In one skit, Ms. Z submitted to three different voice lessons at the same time. "Place it in the mask," variously exhorted the teachers' recorded voices, and the obedient singer, having gone through all their paces, finally simply turned her face to the audience as she sang, gently evoking the question: is the mask a filter through which the singer communicates her own personality, or the artificial facade of an assumed role?

In other skits, Ms. Z let her operatic talents hang out, offering "Vissi d'Arte" from "Tosca," for instance, in a cacophonous first-half finale that juxtaposed her with two other divas, on video, singing Mozart and Puccini arias at the same time. The evening's penultimate number, "Ebben, n'Andro Lontana," showcased her singing a famous Catalani aria in duet with a computer voice "reading" the aria's text in English and Italian, picking apart syllables, that had no meaning to it. The old melody became something rich and strange and old, retaining its purity through the electronic haze of the modern world.

If the evening wasn't quite so powerful overall as some of its individual parts, it was always fun to watch. Ms. Z has created a kind of contemporary-music vaudeville, offering a lot of entertainment, a lot of quality and some fine nuggets to mull over on your way home.

"Voci" will be repeated tonight at the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea.