Feshareki/BBC Singers/Goddard review – goddess-inspired soundscape

Shiva Feshareki's Divine Feminine premiered at St Martin-in-the-Fields, transforming the nave, gallery and sanctuary into an intricately amplified "360° soundscape". It is not, as billed, an opera; it might be an installation, a piece of music-theatre, even a therapy session.

The work celebrates the divine feminine — a concept never explicitly defined here — and gestures toward fecundity, sisterhood, rebirth and goddess-energy, but it never quite finds its focus. Karen McCarthy Woolf's text acts less as a libretto than a sequence of poems, some sung, most spoken.

It traces the Celtic goddess Brigid, aided by a grimoire of global goddesses and a mortal teenager called Snowdrop, marked out by a "cool cherry vape" and phrases such as "OMG" and "kick arse", who must smash the patriarchy and summon the return of spring. Soprano Emma Tring was an incandescent, fearless Brigid, charging through keening cries and lilting Irish-style tunes, shifting from sweetness to a hoarse, primal edge.

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