Lucas Steele - Kate Soper: The Romance of the Rose (2024)

Throughout her work, composer Kate Soper identifies the subtle boundaries that define convention and subverts them, creating her own new vocabulary in the process. In works for voice and instruments, Soper has developed an intertwined language that flows seamlessly between spoken and sung gestures and integrates the vocal and instrumental parts to form compelling hybrid instruments whose timbral characteristics and synergies shift with each instrumentation. On a collaborative New Focus release with electronic music composer Sam Pluta, The Understanding of All Things, Soper cultivates philosophical inquiry through a musical forum, using text and the dialogue between performer and audience as the canvas to explore questions of the meaning of expressive and creative activity. In recent works, Soper has turned her attention to opera, bringing these stylistic characteristics to the format alongside a penchant for poly-stylistic collage. Soper elects to use an instrumentation that affords her coloristic flexibility, adding harp, electric guitar, saxophone, and electronics to a more conventional instrumentation of clarinets, violin/viola, cello, piano, and percussion. The Romance of the Rose embraces influences from medieval poetry and the troubadour tradition, romantic opera, musical theatre and torch song, progressive rock, electronic music, and modernism to capture a multi-colored tapestry of expressive territory that facilitates this extended meditation on the nature of love and human emotion.