HomeJuly 2002
The composer and singer Jenni Roditi was born in London on 22 August 1961 and studied composition and piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Robert Saxton, Oliver Knussen and Peter Wiegold. After graduation in 1984 she studied with Boris Moore at the Roy Hart Theatre and the Indian Raga with Gilles Petit, both of which enabled her to develop her singing voice into an especially versatile and dramatically expressive instrument.
There are few composers in Britain who are also professional singers. The mention of the Roy Hart Theatre indicates that her interest in that field lies in more recent developments in voice production and expression, and her work, both as performer and composer, shows this to a degree unmatched by any other contemporary creative musician in Britain.
It would be quite wrong, however, to assume that Jenni Roditi's compositions exclusively include the voice. As early in her career as 1985 she wrote a large-scale 24-minute orchestral work, September Boxes, of which the Premiere was conducted by Lionel Friend, followed in 1986 by another, Six Coins in a Fountain. In 1993 she composed Hay in the Sky, a Quartet for four Clarinets followed a year later by a String Quartet for the Archaeus Quartet.
Nonetheless, it is true that vocal music has tended to predominate in her output, and even in her non-vocal works the sense of lyric flow is perhaps its most notable feature. It may appear obvious but Roditi's melodic gifts come across as entirely spontaneous and natural, yet have a modern feel that is at once very attractive in the sense that her work appears quite unbound by stylistic convention, exhibiting a memorability which causes the listener never to lose interest in the music or in its progress in time.
These qualities are not given to all composers and a particularly attractive feature of her work is that it ranges in duration from full-scale operas down to a mere 90 seconds, with Little Epic, a "mini- opera for the unknown public" making Milhaud's seven-minute Opera-minutes seem positively Wagnerian in comparison.
Jenni Roditi has written three other operas. The first, in 1986, was a one-act Baylis Programme piece, Round Trip, the later larger operas being Inanna, in five Acts, premiered in 1992, which has had three productions by Lontano and is scored for six Singers, String Quartet, Flute, Keyboards and Percussion, and the more recent Spirit Child, premiered in May 2001 also by Lontano, which is scored for six Voices, eight Strings, Percussion and a Duduk, an Armenian pipe instrument. The opera itself grew out of an earlier work, Spirit Child Prelude. There is also her 14-minute TV opera, SOS, subtitled Songs of Seduction, broadcast on BBC2 in 1998.
Inanna, which was first performed in 1992, is based upon the Sumerian version of the story of Persephone. Inanna, who has rescued the magic Huluppu Tree and receives wondrous gifts, says goodbye to her husband and proceeds to explore the Underworld, wherein she stares into the eyes of Death. Violence and danger await her, but she is rescued and returns to the Upperworld, after which she inaugurates the sequence of the four Seasons. It made a significant impact at its premiere. Stephen Johnson, in The Independent, suggesting that "the style tends towards a kind of Worid/Rock/Musical hybrid." It is most welcome news that Lontano, under Odaline de la Martinez, is to record the opera this year.
The story, of course, is a voyage of self- discovery, and it may be that writing Inanna was part self-realisation and part recreative re-birth for the composer. As she herself said: "After I wrote Inanna I had a change of direction." Quite what this change was is best left for her own psyche but the most important practical musical result surely has been her latest opera, Spirit Child, written in response to a documentary about the Chinese oppression of Tibet and the abduction of the boy Panchen Lama in 1995. Jenni Roditi wrote or her intent behind the piece: "Moved to take action, I began to think what I could do to help."
The road to Hell, as most of us know and some of us find out, is paved with good intentions and it is always difficult to ascertain how, if at all, an artistic state- ment can change political aims, but, to quote from Stephen Johnson's notice of the opera's premiere: "I don't know if Spirit Child will ever melt stony hearts in Beijing, but it certainly melted mine. The ardent lyricism that emerged fitfully in Roditi's opera Innana was sustained here."
Having heard Jenni Roditi's Spirit Child Prelude, with the astonishing Sianed Jones in matchless vocal form, I can confirm Stephen Johnson's enthusiasm for the music. This really is a remarkable achieve- ment but created at some personal cost to the composer, who has said: "I want to take a step back and think where I go next. I know that I have another opera in me, somewhere, but it will take time for it to come out."
Among its new Century resolutions the English National Opera Company has indicated that it is looking for new voices. Jenni Roditi's music may well prove to be ideal for such a creative leap forward.
A work which deserves the attention ot the many Choral Societies which abound in the UK and elsewhere is Devotion that Moves the Heart, subtitled A Prayer calling the Lama from Afar, a beautiful, meditative and immediately accessible score for Mixed Chorus of any size with either Organ or Electronic Keyboard. It falls into two parts, both capable of being performed separately. To ask for a score or to hear recordings of Roditi's music telephone 020 8374 2758.
I mentioned earlier that her work poses few problems for today's attentive listener, and its remarkable synthesis is an admirable quality for a creative artist not hidebound by the straightjacket of any particular compositional theories. Roditi is clearly, in those recordings of her singing I have heard, an artist of exceptional vocal gifts, and these are not always easy to replicate in live performance. While singers and instrumentalists have to work at her music but when it receives performances which truly recreate what this singular composer is trying to say we are transported to a wider world, untrammelled by a system which, in many respects, has served its purpose for many of today's composers: a world in which Jenni Roditi reveals a great paradox: The world may have undoubtedly shrunk, thanks to modern-day communication, but it has, thereby, grown bigger.
photograph by Stephanie de Leng
© 2002-2004 Jenni Roditi | All Rights Reserved