Singing star Lotte Betts-Dean takes festival audience on whirlwind musical tour

Singer Lotte Betts-Dean unleashes a spellbinding ‘time travelling tapestry’ in Sydney Festival concert.

Australian mezzosoprano Lotte Betts-Dean performing with Ronan Apcar for the Sydney Festival. Picture: Wendell Teodoro

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When UK-based Australian mezzosoprano Lotte Betts-Dean was asked to give a recital for Sydney Festival she wanted it to reflect her whole musical identity. The result was a program of 24 pieces ranging over several genres, old and new, which she describes as a “time travelling tapestry”.

Singing (and speaking) for 70 minutes, virtually non-stop, was an extraordinary feat of stamina and control and it showcased her formidable vocal technique. Joining her on this spellbinding journey was young Sydney-based pianist and composer Ronan Apcar. Between them they ranged over a sound world in which an exquisite Claudio Monteverdi madrigal was sandwiched between a pounding electronic arrangement of Sinead O’Connor’s Jackie and a new work by British-Canadian avant-garde composer Isabella Gellis with the text “I wish I could speak to you like a butcher knife just wiped clean”.

Refreshingly, female composers outnumbered their male counterparts, with 17th century Italian Baroque self-publisher Barbara Strozzi featured alongside Australia’s own Indie pop diva Courtney Barnett (Kim’s Caravan). Art songs from four centuries were performed acoustically, sometimes grouped by language. Betts-Dean paired the lush melancholy of Lili Boulanger’s Parfois, je suis triste (Sometimes I’m sad) with Olivier Messiaen’s luminous Priere exaucee (Answered prayer), before moving to Germany – where she was born – for the “new music” of Arnold Schoenberg contrasted with the late Romantic yearning of Clara Schumann’s Warum willst du and’re fragen? (Why will you question others?).

At least half the program was electronic, Betts-Dean working a laptop with loops and delays while Apcar switched athletically – and with immaculate timing – between conventional keyboard and various effects, including working synth pedals with his bare foot and drumming under the lid of the piano.

There were many standout moments to be enjoyed before the pair moved swiftly on to the next number. US composer and performer Caroline Shaw’s wordless Rise swept over the audience like a wave, the simple block chords and Betts-Dean rich, seamless soprano building to a crescendo of whirling dissonance.

Her uncanny vocal virtuosity also came to the fore in Mouthpiece by Erin Gee – another American composer – an award-winning showstopper in which a sequence of wordless notes and sounds are mixed in with lip pops and whistles.

Betts-Dean, the daughter of eminent Australian composer and violist Brett Dean and expressionist painter Heather Betts, is based in London and several UK and Irish artists were on the track list, including Mathis Saunier whose new work Cannibal is a combination of rapid-fire rap and vocal pyrotechnics against a background of explosive electronics.

Folk music was also a vital component, including a lovely setting of the English ballad Rosemary Lane and one of Bela Bartok’s irresistible short Hungarian folksongs.

To finish this fascinating, breathless smorgasbord Betts-Dean treated the sold-out audience to a dash of cabaret with William Bolcom’s Waitin’ before the wonderful Blossom Dearie’s Touch the Hand of Love brought a sense of gentle piece to the end of the set.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL

• CONCERT Lotte Betts-Dean

• WHERE ACO The Neilson

• WHEN January 17