SHÉHÉRAZADE & SIBELIUS
Fleur Barron
PROGRAM NOTES
By Grace-Evangeline Mason, Janet E. Bedell, and Aaron Grad
Hailed as“ a knockout performer” by The Times, GRAMMY Award-winning Fleur Barron is an artist of striking versatility, celebrated for her vivid interpretations of repertoire spanning baroque, Weill, contemporary, and 19th century French music. Recognized as a leading Mahler interpreter of the new generation, she is equally known for her collaborations with living composers and curating multidisciplinary projects that explore connections across cultures and musical styles.
Highlights of the current symphonic season include performances with Sir Antonio Pappano and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Daniel Harding and the Czech Philharmonic, and Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among others. She also tours Mahler’ s Kindertotenlieder to Vienna, Amsterdam, and Linz with the Mahler Academy Orchestra.
On the recital platform, the mezzo is heard in a six-city U. S. tour with Trio Afiori, a voice-clarinet-piano trio she created with Anthony McGill and Gloria Chien, in her Kabuki Winterreise project at Wigmore Hall and Schloss Elmau, and in recital with Joseph Middleton at Wigmore Hall and Garsington Opera.
She appears with Opéra de Bordeaux in a staged production of Mozart’ s Requiem, and in leading roles in two world premieres by composer-collaborator Bryce Dessner: Herakles Mad at Theater Basel, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds— a fully-produced monodrama for mezzo and ensemble, with poetry by Ocean Vuong— at various European festivals.
Born in Northern Ireland to a Singaporean mother and British father, Fleur grew up in Hong Kong and later New York. She holds degrees from Columbia University( B. A. Comparative Literature) and Manhattan School of Music( M. M. Vocal Performance).
Victoria Cadisch
Grace-Evangeline Mason
Born October 1994 in West Midlands, England Currently resides in the U. K.
ABLAZE THE MOON [ 2023 ]
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, three clarinets( third doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, vibraphone, tom toms, tam tam, glockenspiel, harp, and strings.
First performed by BBC Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mark Wigglesworth, July 18, 2023, as part of the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, London.
‘ ABLAZE THE MOON’( 2023) for orchestra is inspired by the poem“ Tonight” by the American lyric poet, Sara Teasdale( 1884-1933). The melodies in the piece follow the lines of the poem, which are full of vivid descriptions and begin‘ The moon is a curving flower of gold, the sky is still and blue; The moon was made for the sky to hold, and I for you.’
In this short concert opener, the image of the moon as a flower of gold hanging in a dark sky is alluded to by atmospheric passages that begin in the circling woodwinds. These are contrasted with deep punctuations in the strings suggesting the vast darkness that surrounds it. These forceful interjections ignite the woodwinds to intersperse, fall, and spiral, momentarily accentuating the inky backdrop of the sky. The music drives forward through the expanse, with the horns and brass building the texture, until the piece opens out into an ethereal, and celestial space as‘ the sky is luminous; eternity was made for them, to-night for us.’
GRACE-EVANGELINE MASON, 2023
Maurice Ravel
Born March 7, 1875 in Ciboure, France Died December 28, 1937 in Paris, France
SHÉHÉRAZADE [ 1898 ]
Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, tambourine, suspended cymbal, bass drum, cymbals( pair), keyboard, glockenspiel, snare drum, tam tam, triangle, two harps, celeste, and strings, in addition to the soprano soloist.
Around 1900, Maurice Ravel was one of the founding members of the Apaches, a group of forward-looking young French artists, including writers, painters and composers, including poet / painter / composer Arthur Justin Léon Leclère( 1874-1966), who adopted the exotic nom de plume Tristan Klingsor( after two leading characters in Richard Wagner’ s operas). In 1902, Klingsor completed a collection of 100 poems inspired by the tale of Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights as expressed musically by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in his famous orchestral tone poem. The theme of Klingsor’ s poems was the allure of the lands and cultures of Asia to European observers. One year later, in 1903, Ravel chose three of these poems for his second work on this theme; the first had been a Shéhérazade Overture, written in 1898. He had Klingsor declaim his selected poems over and over for him, so Ravel could capture the rhythms and stresses of his readings accurately in his music.
Set in the haunting and rarely used key of E-flat minor,“ Asie” evokes the exotic attractions of the various lands of Asia from the Middle East to China. The singer’ s lines are molded closely to the words like recitative over the large, subtly colored orchestra. In“ La Flûte enchantée,” the orchestra is reduced so that it is essentially a duet between the flute and the singer. Ambiguity rules the final song,“ L’ Indifférent,” where flutes and clarinets, solo and in pairs, lead the fragile woodwind sounds, and an unresolved harmony at the end seals the ambiguous atmosphere.
JANET E. BEDELL is a program annotator and feature writer who writes for Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Caramoor Festival of the Arts, and other musical organizations.
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