Osvaldo Golijov (1960)

Lúa Descolorida (2002)

for soloist and string ensemble

  • General information
    • Composition date: 2002
    • Duration: 6 mn
    • Publisher: Boosey & Hawkes
    • Commission: Barlow Endowment for Music Composition (pour le chant), Orchestre du Minnesota (pour l'orchestration)
    • Libretto (details, author):

      Rosalía de Castro.

Detailed formation
  • soloist: soprano
  • strings

Premiere information

  • Date: March 2002
    Location:

    États-Unis, Minneapolis


    Performers:

    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.