Julia Holter is an American composer, singer, songwriter, record producer, artist, and academic. Her recording career dates back 15 years since when she has released a series of studio albums all of which share the same central characteristics of innovation, imagination, and fierce individuality. Her commitment to the exploration of wider musical horizons knows no limits.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is a French silent film and is based on the historical transcripts of the actual trial of Joan of Arc, a 15th century religious visionary, saint martyred by her Catholic Church, national symbol for the French cause during the Hundred Years’ War, and heroine of the Gallic country. Released in 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc was directed by the Danish filmmaker and screenwriter Carl Theodor Dreyer and is commonly regarded as a silent-movie masterpiece.
And these two supreme examples of classic cultural expressionism combine to startling effect this evening at Huddersfield Town Hall as part of the West Yorkshire town’s annual Contemporary Music Festival, the largest event of new and experimental music to take place in the United Kingdom.
Here, Julia Holter is joined by her band and the 36-strong Chorus of Opera North for the long-awaited premiere of her soundtrack to The Passion of Joan of Arc. Holter’s band features her regular collaborators, Corey Fogel (percussion), Tashi Wada (bagpipes/synths), and Sarah Belle Reid (trumpet). Conducting the Chorus is Hugh Brunt.
In The Passion of Joan of Arc’s opening scene a hand can be seen leafing through the pages of the original court records which are held in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. This vignette captures the film’s eye for accurate detail, albeit one that compresses the events of a four-month trial and Joan’s subsequent burning at the stake into a single day.
This belief in authenticity would appear to have informed Julia Holter’s approach towards this commission for the Chorus of Opera North and the creation of her live musical score for the film. Mediaeval art and music have long been a source of great interest and inspiration for Holter and this much can be heard on her last studio album, Aviary, where deep shades of sonic colour and texture from the Middle Ages percolate through that record. And tonight Julia Holter adapts a couple of mediaeval chants from the period in which Joan of Arc actually lived and they appear, in various forms, as a leitmotif to the soundtrack.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is a deeply harrowing film, represented in a series of lingering, claustrophobic close-up shots of the dramatis personae. This forensic examination of the leading characters’ faces heightens the judges and jailers’ more grotesque and disturbing features whilst Joan of Arc’s pain, confusion, and suffering – an utterly compelling performance by Renée Jeanne Falconetti in the lead role – becomes almost unbearable to watch.
The live score – an astonishing confluence of consistently empathic, often striking instrumentation with the massed choral voices – undoubtedly magnifies the film’s tension and drama, but it does not seek to be a literal reflection of its narrative. Instead it works within the space afforded to it, retaining the film’s hypnotic sense of mystery as it does so.
Interviewed in 1965, three years before his death, Carl Theodor Dreyer said that he had not yet heard a score specially composed for The Passion of Joan of Arc with which he had been happy. In fact, it was even suggested at the time that Dreyer may have preferred that the film be experienced in complete silence. Had he had the immense good fortune to be inside the magnificent surroundings of Huddersfield Town Hall this evening, I believe that he would have wholeheartedly approved of this incredibly ambitious and most powerfully expressive of soundtracks to his extraordinary film.
Julia Holter: The Passion of Joan of Arc was commissioned and produced by Opera North Projects. Co-produced by the Barbican, the Brudenell Social Club and hcmf//.
Photo Credit: Brian Slater
