Kate Soper: The Hunt

Today’s composers are a great deal more likely to use vocal works to make sociopolitical points – even when they reach well into the past for inspiration. Some composers can do this quite cleverly, one such being Kate Soper (born 1981), whose chamber opera The Hunt is packed with contemporary approaches and sensibilities that are unlikely to sustain over the long term but do not appear to have any such concerns, staying focused on the here-and-now in a kind of forced philosophical manner. The Hunt – which happens to have 26 sections, although the number has no significance – is unusual in design, using three sopranos to tell the story and having each of them play an instrument instead of being accompanied by a separate ensemble. This is diegetic music – that is, the on-stage performers play pieces within the context of the work and can themselves hear the music, thus “breaking” a kind of “fourth wall” of sound as they participate in a narrative, and are aware that they do so, even as they function as characters within it. This and other sensibilities of The Hunt are quite contemporary in nature, even though the work was inspired by medieval tapestries illustrating the hunt for a unicorn through the use of a virgin as bait: lured by purity, the unicorn approaches and can then be captured by hunters. Soper, unsurprisingly for a modern composer, chooses to use the old legend as the basis of a critique of societal attitudes toward gender and sexuality, thus deliberately denying the tale any level of universality that it might otherwise have. She does employ a mixture of styles, including folk and chorale and parlor song and musical theater, and she even uses a mixture of Latin and English to establish the opening scene. Her musical language is unabashedly contemporary: hearing Latin homophony declaimed in strong dissonance with overlays of Sprechstimme is at the very least an intriguing experience. The verbiage (most of it also by Soper, with bits by Christina Rossetti and symbolist poet Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D.) is often self-consciously self-aware, and the vocal techniques tend to make much of the argument difficult to follow even when the underlying music itself is modest in scale. The Huntis an intriguingly experimental bit of avant-garde sort-of-opera, with some elements of genuine creativity (for instance, the voices in First Sighting speak so rapidly over each other that they sound like electronics, while those voices’ high level of clarity in The Noble Unicorn creates a brief Gilbert-and-Sullivan-esque moment). The presentational quirkiness of this (+++) release is actually its most attractive element. It does undermine the intended seriousness of the messages that Soper wants to communicate, but that is perhaps all to the good, since the structure and sound of The Hunt are more unusual and innovative than the rather formulaic meanings it seeks to convey.

— Mark Estren, 4.19.2024

Kate Soper’s one-act opera, The Hunt, might just as easily be called a music theater piece. There is no orchestra, only a cast of three sopranos singing either a cappella or accompanied by instruments—violin and ukulele—that they play. The fairy-tale plot is about hunting for the mythical unicorn, but the message, strongly feminist, mingles medieval and contemporary elements. Texts for improvised folk songs come from Hildegard von Bingen and Thibaut de Champagne in the Middle Ages, for example, but the three maidens at the center of the story also send livestream updates to the King who has sent them on their quest.

The origins of the unicorn legend lie in antiquity, but the medieval beast became a white horse that symbolized purity—in an elaborate Christian allegory, the Virgin Mary tames the wild creature with a glance, and parallels were drawn between hunting the unicorn and the Passion of Christ. Soper takes her inspiration from gender politics, ascribing to the King the harshness of subjugating the three maidens, the violence of hunting down the unicorn, and the desire for power that the creature will give him. The kernel of this theme comes from the medieval belief that only a virgin could capture the unicorn.

What I’ve described so far will probably be a generational litmus test. The feminist intention to liberate the virgins’ sexuality and the hold that men have over them will strike a chord with young audiences but might cause older listeners to turn away. Sincerity and smugness are both in evidence. The Hunt was commissioned by the Miller Theater at Columbia University, and the premiere in October 2023 was a genuine event (there’s an extensive New York Times review online). The costumes, lighting, and background projections were reportedly first-rate. The abstract unitary set, which was primarily a depiction of a clearing in the forest, looked more like a prison (not surprisingly) trapping the three virgins. All of this, along with Soper’s reputation for composing theater pieces—a previous chamber opera, Ipsa Dixit, was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Price in music—helped to lighten the programmatic feminism of the tale.

Soper’s score, as experienced without the staging, is often light, sly, and mischievous. She leans heavily on the faux naif, particularly at the outset, when the three virgins view their search for the unicorn in good spirits—they sing, have lunch, and occasionally hear a bawdy riddle from a silent Stable Boy, whose voice is sung by one of the sopranos, as is the offstage King’s. The opera is divided into 26 numbers with clear, repetitive tiles, primarily Riddle, Song, Livestream, and King’s Comment. In the course of events the three generic virgins acquire personalities as Fleur, Briar, and Rue. They discover their sexuality and gain a singular freedom by losing their virginity, Rue by sleeping with the Stable Boy, Briar and Fleur with each other. In this way they reclaim power over their bodies, which the King arrogantly possessed before.

I haven’t heard any of Soper’s previous operas, but The Sirens, in which she also sang, was also for three sopranos discussing gender issues. In The Hunt she adroitly avoids the monotony that could have set in from an hour of unrelieved soprano singing. The idiom is contemporary but accessible and theatrically effective. There are no memorable melodies, but the close harmony between the three voices is often traditionally consonant. Soper is very fortunate in her talented cast, who easily encompass the score’s demands and sing with real accomplishment. Characterization doesn’t always keep up, but Soper’s libretto is broad (featuring, for me, uncomfortable sexual explicitness), and everyone’s enunciation is crystal clear.

In short, a contemporary feminist parable in medieval guise gets an ideal treatment. The hit movie “Barbie” proved that issues of gender politics can be treated with humor and imagination. The medicine doesn’t go down quite as easily in The Hunt, and one can imagine it becoming dated before long. For the moment, however, Soper’s opera is like an extended livestream for our times.

— Huntley Dent, 5.11.2024

Kate Soper was very much in our viewfinder this month — onstage via Long Beach Opera’s recent production of Ipsa Dixit and on CD with the release of her latest opera, The Hunt (New Focus Recordings). The latter is a rather modest entry in Soper’s string of theater pieces, lasting 55 minutes and utilizing just three a cappella female singers who occasionally accompany themselves on two ukuleles and violin.

The subject matter is unicorns — specifically, a medieval legend that the only way to capture one of those mythical creatures is to use a virgin maiden to lure it to said maiden’s lap, the hunters then taking it from there. With 21st-century politics in mind, Soper related this tale, in her words, to “the current cultural obsession with controlling female sexuality, the fear of gender nonconformity, and the dogged way those in power cling to easily refutable, outlandish lies.”

In The Hunt, three virgins are sent to find a unicorn by an unseen king whose pronouncements as related by the women are laden with irritating electronic feedback. The ladies report back on their cellphones — an endearingly irreverent anachronism if the production is set in medieval times, which it doesn’t have to be because the synopsis says, “In medieval and/or contemporary times.”

In “Sugar Song,” late in the opera, the bored maidens trip out on sugar cubes laced with belladonna and experience hallucinations, rolling their r’s like race cars all over their ranges, laughing and spouting gibberish (aka extended vocal techniques). Belladonna, otherwise known as deadly nightshade, is toxic when ingested.

Eventually the unicorn appears, and so do the hunters who can’t catch it. The virgins decide to protect the unicorn by ridding themselves of their virginity, with two of them pairing off with each other and the third finding an unseen yet willing stable boy to perform the deed. In doing so, the ex-virgins are symbolically ridding themselves of authoritarian male domination. Bully for them.

The score largely sounds like a stream of madrigals, with the mostly false sightings of the beast resulting in a babble of voices. As in Ipsa Dixit, the words come from Soper and an assortment of found texts by others, dating back to Pliny the Elder, as abridged and set to melodies by the composer. Christiana Cole (Briar), Brett Umlauf (Fleur), and Hirona Amamiya (Rue) are the three sopranos who capably sing the parts of the virgins and play their instruments under the musical direction of Mila Henry.

Ultimately, though, the whole work is a bit tiresome to sit through. The collection of poetic texts from several hands gives you little sense of forward motion through the plot, and the score doesn’t veer much into the freely eclectic pursuits that have fired up Soper’s ample imagination in previous theater pieces. The best number, “The Noble Unicorn,” is a bawdy folk song with a nice tripping rhythm and a funny ending. Otherwise, The Hunt amounts to a pit stop for Soper as we await to hear where her inventive muse leads her next.

— Richard Ginell, 6.25.2024