It's a reasonable guess that no spookier piece has been heard in New York this year. Mass for the Dead' is dedicated to an 18th-century ghost that Ms. Shields apparantly encountered in Rhode Island six years ago. Alice Shields posesses a telling and eclectic sense of theatre, a startling extension of the consciousness of India, in an equally startling Western opera of the seen and unseen. The complex interplay between tape and live audio, accenting, shading, balancing a fortune of high-tech equipment, was a performance in itself. Highly recommended in a field that still has very few examples.
Apocalypse is relentless.
Besides composing electronic scores for stage and television, she has also sung mezzo-soprano roles with major opera companies and danced with a visiting Indian company in the Hindu Festival of Lights. There is also much taken from Greek tragedy, including a chorus which dismembers and eats Shiva in a frenzy of Dionysian ecstasy. Much of the vocal effects are transformed by electronic manipulation, often to the point of incomprehensibility. This is obviously intentional and includes even tape reversal of some phrases. Attendance at an actual performance would add much that is needed to make a meaningful evaluation of this work.