general information

composition date
2002
duration
6 min
editor
Boosey & Hawkes
Commission
Barlow Endowment for Music Composition (pour le chant), Orchestre du Minnesota (pour l'orchestration)
Libretto (details, author)

Rosalía de Castro.

type

Vocal music and instrument(s) (Voice(s) and/or choir(s) and strings)

detailed formation

Soloist
soprano

strings

information about the creation

date
March 2002

États-Unis, Minneapolis

interpreters

Dawn Upshaw et l'Orchestre du Minnesota, direction : Alan Gilbert.

observations

Il existe également deux versions de chambre de cette œuvre : pour soprano et piano, créée et enregistrée par par Dawn Upshaw (voix) et Gilbert Kalish (piano) sur l'album "Voices of Light" (Nonesuch 2004) et pour soprano et quatuor à cordes, créée par Dawn Upshaw et le Kronos Quartet.

Program note

'A dead man in Spain is more dead there than anywhere else' said García Lorca, explaining that Spanish poets define rather than allude. Lúa Descolorida, a poem by Lorca's beloved Rosalía de Castro written in Gallego (the language of the Galicia region in Spain) defines despair in a way that is simultaneously tender and tragic. The musical setting is a constellation of clearly defined symbols that affirm contradictory things at the same time, becoming in the end a suspended question mark. The song is at once a slow motion ride in a cosmic horse, an homage to Couperin's melismas in his Lessons of Tenebrae, and velvet bells coming from three different churches. But the strongest inspiration for Lúa Descolorida was Dawn Upshaw's rainbow of a voice, and I wanted to give her music so quietly radiant that it would bring an echo of the single tear that Schubert brings without warning in his voicing of a C major chord. The original version of this song was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition and premiered by Dawn Upshaw and Gilbert Kalish in April 1999.



Osvaldo Golijov, site internet du compositeur.

similar works


This entry is encyclopaedic in nature and does not reflect the collections of the Ircam media library. Please refer to the "scores" entries.


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