With an uncanny ability to create otherworldly sounds through their blended voices, the a cappella group Sjaella, six young women from Leipzig, has been making waves in Europe, and now they’re coming to Snow Concert Hall.
Described as “uniform yet individual, gentle yet robust, precise yet free-flowing,” Sjaella’s versatile approach since starting out in 2005, has seen them perform at famed concert halls such as the Mozarteum Salzburg, the Wiener Musikverein, the Wiener Konzerthaus, and the Palace of Arts in Budapest and in collaborations with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.
Sjaella have also toured to Jordan, Azerbaijan, Hungary, South Africa and, most recently, South Africa, Belgium, Spain and Norway.
Their 2013 album Preisung (Praise) was nominated for the German Record Critics’ Award, and Meridiane – NORD from 2018 won the American CARA Award for Best Folk/World Album.
Adopting an unorthodox approach by combining Baroque with jazz and contemporary music, the group has also devoted attention to stories of supernatural beings, Nordic landscapes, love, loss and reunion in folk songs from Latvia, Norway, Ireland, Germany and Finland.
They’ve been garnering enthusiastic new audiences at music events such as the Rheingau Musik Festival, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Mosel Musikfestival, Musikfest ION, and have won many prizes, including the festival Tampereen Sävelin Finland.
Selected Baroque arias from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen forms the backbone of the first half of the Canberra concert, interwoven with extracts from Le chant des oiseaux, by French Renaissance composer Clément Janequin and Dolce Cantavi by contemporary American composer Caroline Shaw, recreating the sounds of birds twittering, before the icy sounds of Crystallized, by German-Armenian composer, Meredi.
Sjaella’s versatility will be on show after interval with numbers including a Livonian Herding Song, the famous Irish traditional number, Our Wedding Day (She Moved Through the Fair) and a Breton Drinking Song,
Always on the lookout for new sounds, in 2021 their album Origins, released on Outhere Music, was praised by Le Monde as “like life itself: a cycle made up of many smaller ones.”
Sjaella, at Snow Concert Hall, July 23.
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