A breath of room, and then strings — not a melody yet, just a soft, quick rocking in the chords, the texture this whole piece will live inside. By 0:05 the soprano is simply there, already mid-breath, singing no words at all. That is the premise of a vocalise: one vowel, shaped and reshaped, a voice behaving like an instrument that happens to have a body. Her opening phrases arch upward and spill down again, and every descent lands gently, more exhale than arrival.

Two times run at once underneath her. The accompaniment keeps its light, pulsing sway while her line moves in long, slow spans, so the ear can choose either speed — the rocking or the floating — and the pull between them is part of the sweetness. The early minutes set a cycle the piece will keep deepening rather than replacing: a climb, a crest where the strings swell up to meet her, a soft settling. Around the first big crest the support blooms warmly beneath her highest sustained tone, then thins just as she resolves downward. Rise, bloom, release. It happens again, and again, each round a little richer.

The first real turn is an absence. A note tapers; briefly the strings speak alone; when she returns it is with different material — chromatic steps climbing half-tone by half-tone, ornamental descending turns, a luminous lift into her upper register. Near 2:55 comes the larger withdrawal: she stops altogether, and the strings take the theme into a full development, carrying the melody in her own register, pushing the harmony further from home than it has gone. For a stretch the piece becomes pure orchestra, and her silence is strangely loud.

When the main theme returns at 3:33, it is recognizably the same shape — same arch, same pulsing support — but everything around it has changed. The orchestra has now stated this music at full voice, so her hushed, pure re-entry lands like a private recollection of something just said in public. The support swells more readily under her this time, and a broad rising gesture opens the passage the whole performance has been saving: her warmest, highest singing over the fullest string bed, held, then let down slowly through a long taper. No rupture anywhere — the summit arrives by swelling, and leaves by degrees.

She never comes back after that. From about 5:26 the strings alone carry a coda theme, the old sway still faintly present while the harmony works its way home and the texture thins toward its own ending. The letting-go takes its time — nearly a minute and a half of measured release — until, around 6:40, the sound comes apart into a few spaced, single gestures: one chord, then another, each further away, and then true silence at 6:46 with nothing following it. The ensemble that opened this piece without her closes it without her too, and the vowel that was the only word here goes unspoken to the end.