Album Review: Head as Form'd in the Crier's Choir by Sarah Davachi

The Head… is the artistic culmination of that work. 2020's Cantus, Descant, a highlight in Davachi's discography, was thrilling in its packaging of the harmonic and tonal complexity of centuries of compositional practices into taut and memorable songs. However wonderful the results, some of the ecstatic quality of Davachi's performances might have been lost for those who have experienced the sheer physicality of the pipe organ in the flesh.

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Her latest album, in this instance taking harkening to early Baroque from the seventeenth century, has the use of continuo as one of its main features. This is where the core instrument to the piece (usually a harpsichord) sets the bass notes from which the other instruments in an orchestra could develop the appropriate chords. The practice goes back to early church music, and therefore it is interesting to see Davachi here use a range of church pipe organs both as her continuo instrument and for some beautifully sonorous and resonant solo pieces.

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By invoking the Greek tragedy of Eurydice and Orpheus, Sarah Davachi has delivered her most emotionally resonant drone compositions to date. Share In one of the most ubiquitous Greek myths, Orpheus, in the wake of his wife Eurydice's death, makes a desperate plea to Hades for her return. Hades agreed on one condition: Orpheus must usher her to light through the underworld, but he is strictly forbidden to look back at her, or else she perishes forever. Orpheus glances behind him on their passage home, and by doing so, sends Eurydice back to oblivion. In turn, Orpheus sang for death, which eventually came for him. .

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