Diamanda Galás – review

Somewhere out there is a parallel universe in which Diamanda Galás has a perfectly conventional, dazzling career as a mezzo-soprano. And another in which she is a reasonably straightforward blues-rock star: Tina Turner and Patti Smith rolled into one. And, no doubt, another in which she is entirely unknown: too singular, too demanding for any record label or music venue to risk putting her before an audience.

The imperious woman shrouded in Stygian gloom at the Royal Festival Hall contains all these possibilities and myriad more. Her first song, a poem in Italian by Cesare Pavese, whose title translates as Death Will Come and Will Wear Your Eyes, gives some indication of her range: over piano notes that tilt and quiver as though alarmed by their proximity to each other, she shifts from a soprano at once airy and muddy, to a bass so fierce the acoustic cowers. At one point she begins to wail, and sounds like a procession of Greek women at a funeral.

What follows is a contemplation of death in Spanish, Greek, German, English and French, embellished with trills and shrieks and strangled cries, sensual moans and the cackles of hags. Of course she's showing off – but mostly Galás puts that extraordinary vocal technique to the service of narrative. Without understanding the words, you can sense Nazi destruction in her setting of a poem by German writer-surgeon Gottfried Benn, appreciate that an entire life is splayed before you in Jacques Brel's Fernand. Sometimes her performance feels too emotionally cool, then you remember that her subject is death, and understand that this isn't coldness, it's confrontation: a refusal to be either maudlin or scared. That alone is electrifying.