Victoria Hanna

Victoria Hanna was born into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family deep in the heart of Jerusalem. On one side of the family tree she had a grandmother named Victoria, a rebellious woman who stood up to the servitude of women in the Orthodox community, and on the other side she had Hanna, a woman far more withdrawn and submissive to her fate. Both, she says, were deeply important figures in her life.

The album embraces these two personalities. The first five songs are like Victoria: bold and dramatic, underpinned by wild drum beats and punchy Hebrew raps. The final five songs resemble the gentler Hanna, stripping back the compositions with singing over soft string and piano melodies. As can be heard on the aptly-named ‘Kala Dekalya’ (Voice of All Voices), the purity of her singing is simply breathtaking.

But there is more to the album than the juxtaposition between Victoria and Hanna. It delves into the very nature of the human voice, playing on the Kabbalistic differentiation between dibor (speech) and kal (voice). As Victoria Hanna says: ‘Voice is abstract… Speech is concrete.’ Her rapping of the Hebrew alphabet on one song conveys the concreteness of speech, while the unspeakable beauty of her singing also shows how fluid it can be.