Mirage
Sunday 29 June 4:00 pm The CHURCH
Curated by Jack Symonds
Program Notes
Pascal Dusapin (1955 -)
Wolken (2014)
15 mins
Dusapin is one of the major living figures in European music and his vocal and operatic work is rightly celebrated for its detailed, expressive and original lines which seem to interpret the text as an object in a permanent state of change. This song cycle from 2014 takes Goethe's gnomic poems about clouds and finds a modally refined musical language alternately weightless and unbearably heavy; an onomatopoeia at right angles to the text-object. The four cloud types are duly rendered before a fifth, mysterious song steals in at the end to lead us into another world altogether...
Jane Sheldon
Colloque
6 mins
This piece is an arrangement of a larger piece I wrote for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows in 2023 and is a setting of fragments from Conversations with My Soul, a long poem by Etel Adnan. Her speaker seems to be addressing a lover, a natural force (specifically, fog), and the self, all conflated into one entity at once familiar, faintly intimidating, and in need of comfort; and all able to be interpreted as something divine. Her poem opens with the line, “come along my fog.” In Colloque, the vocal line is intended to be incantatory while being relatively static, an invocation always held within the gently mobile timbral fog provided by the players.
Gabriel Fauré (1845 - 1924)
'Comme Dieu rayonne', 'Eau vivante' & 'Crépuscule' from La Chanson d'Ève, Op. 95 (1910)
7 mins
Eve awakens in Eden, embarking on a day of sublime discovery. Fauré's music itself is revealed like a garden coming into being, unfolding from incredibly simple elements, single pitches emerging one by one, until we are suddenly aware that we are deep in rich harmony, the garden in full bloom. Eve’s body is foregrounded all the while, arriving at an ecstatic, sublime conflation of her self with the garden.
Jack Symonds (1988 - )
À la recherce d'Eden perdu (Cello Sonata no. 2) (2021)
19 mins
I. Eau vivante
II. Intermède (Purgatoire)
III. Entre les jardins du paradis et de l’enfer
This sonata attempts a détente with the artistic world of Paris, circa WWI.
The first movement deals with Gabriel Fauré’s late song Eau vivante from La chanson d'Ève: a miracle of unstable continuity. In Fauré, a constantly refreshed single line weaves through the piano beneath an unbroken surface of delicate harmony: a perfected vision of water in the Garden of Eden.
Eau vivante is an attempt to analyse, synthesise and dip into this spring of harmony, yet is in a process of constant failure. I find it fascinating when a series of musical events which achieve a harmonious result in Fauré can be run aground, taken to extremes and led into impossible dead-ends. I have tried, more than a century later, to reconstruct the rarefied atmosphere conjured by the isolated, near-deaf Fauré at the turn of the 20th Century. Can we really dream of an untrammelled natural world in 2021?
If this movement is a thwarted, unreachable heaven, the second movement is a short, paralysed Purgatory, effortfully going nowhere.
The last movement attempts a more Proustian synthesis between remembered images of heaven and hell, initially presented strictly in alternation but the one continually bleeding into the other to form an unholy, messy reality. Bacchanals, bells and an unexpected berceuse transform dying embers of Fauré-memory and purgatorial inertia into an uneasy repose.
The complete work is commissioned by Kim Williams AM for Blair Harris.
Eau vivante is commissioned by the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) as part The ANAM Set (2021)
Kaija Saariaho (1952 - 2023)
Mirage (2010)
15 mins
A woman, elevated by her aura and her gifts, is alone. Drawn by that aura and those gifts, people have come to see her and to hear her, expecting something quite out of the ordinary.
This is the situation in which we now find ourselves. It was the situation, too, of those who went to southern Mexico in the 1960s to witness the trance states that María Sabina - a shaman of the Mazatec people - would attain with the aid of what she called 'holy children', but which became known more widely as 'magic mushrooms'. Also important to her practice were chants, which were recorded and translated into English. Saariaho sets one of these here, fusing the figures of soprano and shaman, with the cello perhaps as her instigator, questioner and interpreter.
Mirage is one more step in this composer's continuing meditation on the condition of being a woman - a meditation she has voiced in her two operas, L’Amour de loin (2000) and Adriana Mater (2005), in her oratorio La Passion de Simone (2006) and in several smaller works. The soprano protagonist is losing herself in the cosmos; her state is one of exultation. And yet in this state she seems also to be asking for some reassurance, some guidance, as to her identity and her capacity. The work is a stream of joy and release, but also of questioning.
After a slow sounding-out of harmonic space, the piece goes mostly at an energetic tempo. The cello's opening solo is perhaps urging the soprano to begin, and she does so, rapidly gaining strength. In typical Saariaho style, a modal language for the voice - a language that might indeed suggest chant from some ancient tradition -is combined with finely drawn textures that both support and extend the modality. In brief respites the tempo slows, and the cello moves the music towards summoning the voice again. Images of swimming and flight are duly realized in the way both soprano and cello find in the piano a sympathetic but also challenging environment.
(adapted from program note by Paul Griffiths)