Concert review: Julia Holter: The Passion of Joan of Arc, Huddersfield Town Hall

Presented as part of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Julia Holter’s newly finished live score (which gets its world premiere tonight following an earlier version that was aired in Los Angeles in 2017) to Carl Theodor Dryer’s 1928 silent movie masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc – performed by the singer-keyboardist’s band and the Chorus of Opera North, seated beneath a screen showing a newly restored copy of the film – is far more intense than typical politely cerebral avant garde music.

There are scant traces of the sumptuously dreamy, electronically tinged pop of the LA-based songwriter’s acclaimed string of albums, or Holter’s previous soundtrack work for acclaimed American indie film Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) and recent Karen Dalton documentary In My Own Time. There are sections during the thoroughly compelling, in places acutely hypnotic 90-minute performance where the circling, majestically ominous drones cooked up by the 40-odd musicians and singers hint at the subterranean rumble of Sunn 0))) translated for bagpipes and the full collective oomph of a 36-piece choir.

The performance is far more nuanced and powerful than a mere display of raw volume.

Holter’s score combines motifs from the choral church music from the era that Dryer’s classic cinematic interpretation of the religious persecution and rigged 1431 trial of the French saint is set in with techniques drawn from contemporary, minimalist experimental music.

Building from a hushed, funereal march of haunting trumpet wails and brushed percussion to doom-laden, clanging bells as Joan’s fate becomes clear to a soaring, ever-intensifying crescendo for the whole ensemble as the execution on a stake leads to a bloody riot, the score’s movements mirror the film’s unblinking focus on the astoundingly expressive face of actress Renee Jeanne Falconetti, whose expressions move from agony and torment to steely defiance and teary despair, with brief moments of serene calm, as the trial descends to its brutal conclusion.

The masterful results are an uncommonly seamless, spellbinding union of sound and vision. As the final credits roll, the audience's initial stunned silence soon turns into an extended ovation.