Scott Ordway – Girl in the Snow
Julia Dawson; Anna Naretto
Acis APL85820 (acisproductions.com)
Composed by Scott Ordway, Girl in the Snow is a song cycle featuring Canadian mezzo-soprano Julia Dawson and Italian pianist Anna Naretto. Inspired by Saint Augustine’s Confessions, a deeply personal and philosophical narrative, Ordway creates allusive metaphors to describe both the imaginary landscapes of the mind and the places where we store memory. The girl in the snow is initially portrayed as a young girl wandering a snow-covered dreamland and remembering parts of her relationship with nature. The eight songs of the cycle total approximately 37 minutes of music and as the cycle progresses we understand the girl to be a woman reminiscing about her life, the events that have shaped her since, the love she experienced, ultimately, coming back to the present and “awakening” to the end of her life.
Dawson and Naretto act as narrators and bring the audience on an intimate, philosophical journey. Their connected interpretations give life and meaning to poetry that needs a touch of decoding but music that is rich in sounds and colours. Naretto’s playing is nuanced and deliberate while Dawson’s tone quality and colour, distinctively mezzo-soprano, are written in a range more closely aligned with a higher soprano. This, along with the solemn and ethereal nature of the work, especially in the Memory Play sections, leaves the listener feeling unsettled, perhaps intentionally, about the sometimes intangibleness of remembrance.
