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Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

Choreographer

Bobbi Jene Smith

Singer

Julia Bullock

soprano

Instrumentalist

Conor Hanick

Piano(Instrumentalist)

Stage director

Zack Winokur

Harawi -  (Song of Love and Death)

Los Angeles

United States

Bram Goldsmith Theater

Harawi Messiaen

Public

Private

Song of Love and Death

Ayyappa swamy y

Approved

Julia Bullock / American Modern Opera Company - Harawi, Chant d'amour et de mort - DE SINGEL - May 5th 2023

With Harawi the French composer Olivier Messiaen created a moving cycle of twelve songs for soprano and piano. The cycle takes its name from a Peruvian genre of love songs which, just as in the myth of Tristan and Isolde, sing of impossible and fatal love. The fact that Messiaen’s wife was going rapidly downhill due to illness during that period makes the cycle even more moving. What makes it unique is that the composer not only set this Chant d'amour et de mort to French lyrics, but also incorporated sounds from the Quechua language into it.
Accompanied by pianist Conor Hanick, Julia Bullock sings the Peruvian onomatopoeic sounds and the French romantic lyrics. The musicians are accompanied on stage by dancers from the American Modern Opera Company, who bring the songs to life with their choreography. Together they tell a complex story in which voice and body are inextricably entwined.

HARAWI realizes Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting, hour-long song cycle for voice and piano in a newly physicalized and dramatized dimension featuring AMOC* Company members soprano Julia Bullock, pianist Conor Hanick, choreographer/dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, with direction by Zack Winokur. Moving from duet to quartet, this production breaks open Messiaen’s cycle, connects the relationship between movement and music, and grapples with the intensity of love and loss in the human experience.

English

Song of Love and Death by Messiaen, From (2024/2024), Directed by Zack Winokur,, Bram Goldsmith Theater, Los Angeles, United States

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