EdFringe Review: Aud the Deep Minded

Clarinettist and composer, Joanna Nicholson, brought her debut creation, Aud the Deep Minded, to theSPACE Triplex this Fringe. Billed as a “groundbreaking new chamber opera”, I would say it more than lives up to that description.

So what or who is Aud? Well, Aud the Deep Minded was a 9th-century Viking leader, Icelandic settler, and mother of great battlechiefs. That’s right, mother, Aud was also a woman. Nicholson’s Opera tries to look behind the legend to find the human being beneath.

It’s an intensely modern experience, which pushed operatic boundaries even whilst preserving conventions such as aria and recitative. The all-encompassing blend of 9th-century church music, Norwegian folk, and electronica, along with Kirsty Anderson’s dream-like projection,s invites an audience into a unique space.

For its debut, Nicholson recruited a crack team of musicians. Alongside herself on Clarinet were Soprano Clíona Cassidy, Andy Saunders on Horn, and Alistair MacDonald on Electronics. Between them, they wove quite a spell, a tumbling river of melodic currents and eddies which I suspect requires stretches of technical imagination beyond a typical day on the classical stage.

Billed as a “groundbreaking new chamber opera”, I would say it more than lives up to that description.

The story that emerges is tripartite, alluding to the Aud as Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother, and Crone, her person split between Cassidy’s beautifully nuanced song, Nicholson’s spry Clarinet, and Saunders’s gently forceful Horn.

That’s not the only division, however, which also seeks to separate myth from human being via Nicholson’s wry interventions, which interrogate Aud’s interior monologue with a distinctly modern Scots voice.

If all these parts weren’t so organically integrated, it would be far too much to throw at a 40-minute piece. Nicholson and her collaborators have done magnificently to fold all of this technical and artistic ambition into one immersive and undeniably magical experience. There is, I think, too little narrative underpinning the final sequence, but otherwise Aud the Deep Minded is pitch-perfect.

In the end, Nicholson’s most magnificent achievement was in creating a vivid sense of a complicated, living, breathing person and the ancient landscape surrounding them. This is art going where neither the humanities nor science can begin to tread.