Mezzo Ema Nikolovska and Guitarist Sean Shibe Resurrect Orlando in Berkeley

By Daniel Okafor

Mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska and guitarist Sean Shibe premiered four new works on Sunday, Nov. 1, at Berkeley's Hertz Hall, in a recital built around Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando. Cal Performances presented the program, titled Orlando Variations. It contained six recent commissions by composers born as recently as 2002.

The staging announced its ambitions before a note was played. Nikolovska walked out in a jacket covered in dense gold paillettes. Shibe wore an Elizabethan neck ruff over a modern minimalist shirt, with a custom-made classical guitar and a Fender Stratocaster at hand. That's not your standard recital uniform. It set the terms: ancient and modern in dialogue, with love, politics, identity, religion, gender, depression and joy on the table.

Woolf's 1928 novel supplied the structure. Its hero is a 16-year-old nobleman at the court of Queen Elizabeth I who lives more than three centuries, changes gender from male to female while serving as ambassador in 17th-century Constantinople, and ends the book aged 36 in 1928. Nikolovska and Shibe borrowed that shape for a phantasmagoric sequence running from John Dowland and Franz Schubert to Bob Dylan and Laurie Anderson, with percussion and electronic and recorded sounds supplementing voice, acoustic and electric guitars.

How did the program frame three centuries of change?

Two bookends made the argument. Jules Massenet's "Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père," from his 1885 opera Le Cid, is a defeated soldier's prayer of resignation to an all-powerful God. Almost a century later, Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" parodies that aria, swapping God for a Superman representing an automated war-making system that claims omnipotence and fails human beings anyway. Nikolovska sang the Massenet with noble, restrained passion and the Anderson with ironic detachment rooted in minimalism and electronic music. A marvelously flexible artist, in short.

Shibe followed the Massenet with Dowland's Praeludium, P. 98. The Renaissance prelude began life as an improvised warm-up that tested a room's acoustics and the player's hands (a prelude being, in that era, a finger-loosening preamble rather than a set piece). Performer-composers like Dowland later turned the form into a vehicle for virtuosity and deep emotion. Shibe's performance balanced rhythmic flexibility that honored those improvisational roots with a firm grip on structural coherence.

Three Dowland songs followed: "Come Again, Sweet Love Doth Now Invite," "Come, Heavy Sleep," and "Think'st Thou Then by Thy Feigning." They conjured the atmosphere at the start of Woolf's novel, with its themes of love, deception, sorrow, sleep and death.

What did the new commissions do with Woolf?

The afternoon ran as a hybrid of concert and theater, with the lighting and sound crew playing an important if offstage role. The Dowland set slid seamlessly into Sasha Scott's 1000 parts of you, written when Scott was 22, for wordlessly intoning mezzo-soprano, bowed, plucked and strummed electric guitar, and electronic effects. Enhanced by lighting, it evoked Woolf's notion that every person contains thousands of selves. Scott also drew on Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms, and the resulting sound world felt both contemplative and overwhelming — a hall of acoustic mirrors.

Commissions by Linda Catlin Smith, Nahre Sol and Maddie Ashman used texts excerpted from or inspired by Orlando to explore tenderness, confusion, anxiety and ecstasy. Cassandra Miller's Dream Memorandum (It Reminded Me of the Truth) went further into the personal: it used recordings of WhatsApp voice notes from Nikolovska to the composer, plus live speaking, singing, evocative guitar, an arresting extended passage of recorded birdsong and a found percussion instrument. It became an intimate picture of the emotions and ideals behind the whole program.

The performers didn't try to recreate Woolf's narrative. They embraced a stream-of-consciousness aesthetic that mirrored hers. Schubert's "Einsamkeit," from Winterreise, carried the loneliness. Detlev Glanert's "Lied der Wehmut," from his Orlando-Lieder — inspired by Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and the music of medieval troubadours — supplied melancholy longing. Thomas Adès's "Habanera," from his opera The Exterminating Angel, delivered surreal paranoia.

Dylan's "Masters of War" and Anderson's "O Superman" closed the printed program. After several bows, cheers and a standing ovation, Nikolovska and Shibe returned with Alex Paxton's "Be Kind," a gentle vocal exhortation to "be kind to yourself, be kind to the others" over ecstatic commentary on electric guitar. Four premieres on one tour suggests the pair intend this phantasmagoria to have a life beyond Berkeley.