Theodoro Valcárcel (1900–1942)
Tungu tungu
from Cantos del alma vernácula (1935)

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)
Doundou tchil
from Harawi (1945)

Xavier Montsalvatge (1912–2002)
Cuba dentro de un piano
Punto de habanera
from Cinco canciones negras (1945–6)

Ernesto Lecuona (1895–1963)
La señora luna (1937)

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
Von der Schönheit
from Das Lied von der Erde (1908–9)

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)
Tot Op. 48 No. 2 (1933)

Ilse Weber (1903–1944)
Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt (after 1942)
Arrangement by Fleur Barron and Kunal Lahiry

Kurt Weill (1900–1950)
Neid
Epilog
from Die sieben Todsünden (1933)

Intermission

Maurice Delage (1879–1961)
Ragamalika (1914)

Kamala Sankaram (*1978)
The Far Shore (2014)

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
La Flûte enchantée
L’Indifférent
from Shéhérazade (1903)

Kian Ravaei (*1999)
I Will Greet the Sun Again (2024)
Commissioned by the Pierre Boulez Saals and the Internationale Hugo-Wolf-Akademie Stuttgart

Zubaida Azezi (*1990) & Edo Frenkel (*1988)
Ananurhan (2021)

Huang Ruo (*1976)
Fisherman’s Sonnet

Chen Yi (*1953)
Monologue

Lullaby (Northeast China)
Flower Drum Song (Fengyang / China)

The Power and the Glory
A Musical Conversation between Cultures

Anne do Paço

Telling a story that is one’s own, yet touches upon humanity as a whole, in a song recital—that is the idea behind the program that Fleur Barron and Kunal Lahiry have created to bring diverse voices from around the world into dialogue: voices from South America and the Caribbean, Europe, Iran, India, and China. “I grew up in Hong Kong as half British and half Singaporean, experienced the takeover from the British Crown Colony back to a sort of Chinese protectorate, and have been shaped by a wide variety of cultural influences,” says Barron. “This background inspired me to make the history of colonialism and imperialism the starting point of a song program in which my personal experiences are combined with music from different centuries.”

The project has been continuously evolving since its first iteration at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2021. Barron’s artistic partner, the Indian-American pianist Kunal Lahiry, describes the mix of works as “a living, breathing picture of the cultures of the world today” that keeps opening new perspectives while reflecting the mutual fascination of different cultures and the way they resonate within one another. Issues such as the abuse of power, oppression, expulsion, the loss of homeland, identity, or even life, also play an important role. Barron and Lahiry consider all the living composers on the program personal friends—whether because they have been closely connected to their music since their student days or because of “current friendships with composers whose pieces often speak of exodus or complicated identities, such as our commissions to young, non-Western voices like Kian Ravaei, Huang Ruo, or Zubaida Azezi and Edo Frenkel.”

The mezzo-soprano effortlessly switches between many different languages, singing in German, French, Spanish, and English as well as in Uyghur, Farsi, Mandarin, and Quechua. “But there are also new playing and improvisation techniques for Kunal to explore on the piano,” according to the singer, and the pianist explains: “We are thinking in a kind of toolbox, considering carefully which ‘paintbrush’ is the right one for these songs versus these songs, and we do this with a lot of curiosity, spontaneity, and playfulness, because all of this is essential to stimulate our audience.”

The Power and the Glory is an invitation to a musical journey round the globe, where every listener may find a favorite place, but also readjust their listening habits and perspectives in surprising and exciting ways.

*****

Theodoro Valcárcel, who studied at the Milan Conservatory from 1914 and with Felipe Pedrell in Barcelona from 1916 onward, was among the most important Peruvian composers of the 20th century. His Tungu tungu is a melancholy song in which a man expresses his concern about his sad beloved. The piece is one of the Cantos del alma vernácula (“Songs of the Vernacular Soul”) of 1935 on texts in Quechua and Aymara, the indigenous languages of the Andes, in which Valcárcel interweaves elements of native folklore with European influences.

Traditional melodies about unrequited love and privation are known as harawi in the Andes. French composer Olivier Messiaen took these as an inspiration to write a twelve-part song cycle in 1945 using the Quechua language, as does Valcárcel’s Tungu tungu. Doundou tchil describes the dance of a man who woos his beloved like a bird in mating season. Bell-like sounds and transcribed birdsong (a common element in Messiaen’s work) run throughout the piece, in which the composer integrates the South American inspiration into his own, highly individual idiom in a striking way.

Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge had great enthusiasm for the musical culture of Cuba—and, at a time when audio recordings were uncommon, had to resort to unconventional methods of research: on the Costa Brava, he rewarded sailors with Spanish wine if they sang the melodies of their homeland for him, while he wrote them down by hand. This kind of folk song research also found its way into Montsalvatge’s composing, as the two pieces from his Cinco canciones negras of 1945 reveal. Written in the style of a habanera, Cuba dentro de un piano is a nostalgic reminiscence of a Cuba of yore whose Hispanic culture—which had begun its tenure on the island by wiping out the indigenous population—had itself long been replaced by North American influences. The text reflects this by replacing the Spanish sí with an American “yes.” On the other hand, Punto de habanera uses the rhythm of a guajira—a dance derived from the flamenco of Andalusian immigrants—to imagine a Creole woman self-confidently walking past a group of sailors.

Havana-born Ernesto Lecuona takes us directly to Cuba with La señora luna, a lullaby in the form of a Cuban bolero that is part of his 1937 Cinco canciones based on texts by the Uruguayan poet and feminist Juana de Ibarbourou. With more than 600 works to his name, Lecuona is among the most productive composers of his country, and as a pianist, he was also a popular ambassador of Cuban music in Europe.

*****

Von der Schönheit from Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde opens up another perspective of tonight’s program, this one featuring European and Jewish voices. When he wrote his symphonic song cycle in 1908, Mahler was in the midst of a profound crisis. Not only had he been forced to resign from his position as director of the Viennese Court Opera due to an anti-Semitic smear campaign—his daughter Maria Anna had died and he himself was diagnosed with severe heart disease. Mahler may have sought healing properties in an anthology of free adaptations of Chinese poetry Hans Bethge had published under the title Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute); at any rate, the texts provided a space for compositional reflection. By musically articulating opposites such as youth and old age, day and night, transience and eternity, but also loneliness and sociability, as in Von der Schönheit, Mahler employed the polarities of yin and yang as a structural element, lending his work its unique atmosphere through the use of Far Eastern elements such as the weakening of meter, heterophonic influences in the instrumental writing, and pentatonic inflections of harmony.

Comprising only 18 measures, Arnold Schoenberg’s Tot has an entirely different character: it is a song of relentlessly sharp edges and laconic bitterness. The twelve-tone composition forms part of a 1933 collection of songs in which Schoenberg set texts by Jakob Haringer —presumably to support the poet, who was perennially short of cash. At the same time, this somber piece may also have referred to the political situation, which would force Schoenberg to emigrate to the United States shortly afterward.

The poet Ilse Weber, on the other hand, did not manage to escape the Nazi killing machine. She was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 41, having previously been detained in Terezín, along with many other artists. She wrote about 60 songs and poems for the children living there. Their simple, straightforward tone makes them some of the most touching documents from those times, such as Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt, a lament on the loss of one’s home.

The “evils of humanity” are the focus of Kurt Weill’s 1933 satirical “ballet with song” Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins). One of them is envy, not an uncommon sentiment in capitalist systems, which are themselves a form of imperialism. The protagonist Anna enviously observes how other girls seem to be living a happy life in San Francisco, despite committing one “deadly sin” after another. When she finally decides to leave the self-destructive moloch behind and to return to her modest existence in Louisiana, she is liberated from all her burdens.

*****

A student and close friend of Maurice Ravel, Maurice Delage was one of the main protagonists of the Paris artist collective Les Apaches, a rebellious group founded in 1902 and known for its sharp criticism of the academic music establishment and its nationalist inclinations. Delage accompanied his father, a wealthy entrepreneur with international business connections, on trips to India and Japan, where he studied the local musical traditions and adopted elements of them, but not by merely adding “ornaments” to Western music in the sense of what was fashionably known across Europe as “exoticism.” Instead, Delage was out to create a new kind of music by using foreign techniques respectfully. Written in 1914 and setting a text by the Tamil Shaivite saint Ramalinga Swamigal, the song Ragamalika is based on a recording made by the Indian singer Coimbatore Thavi, whom Delage had encountered on a visit to the temples of Mahabalipuram. (The text given in the score is a phonetic transcription of the original and makes no sense linguistically.) With its melismatic vocal line, the piece belongs to the Indian arulpa genre, devotional songs whose traditional drum accompaniment Delage transferred to the piano, manipulating the bass note B by inserting a piece of cardboard among the strings.

Indian ragas were the inspiration for Indian-American composer Kamala Sankaram to write The Far Shore—a work that contrasts expansive vocalizing and fragile soundscapes with ecstatic rhythms. Like Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, it speaks of the eternal cycle of life.

*****

In the late 19th century in particular, many artists were fascinated by the tales of The Arabian Nights, the collection of stories Scheherazade supposedly told the Persian king Shahriyar night after night in an attempt to cure him from his rage and violently murderous inclination. Maurice Ravel, after abandoning plans for a Scheherazade opera, distilled several scenes from the book into a smaller lyrical form when he set texts by Tristan Klingsor in his 1903 song cycle Shéhérazade. La Flûte enchantée tells of a servant enchanted by her lover’s flute playing; L’Indifférent is about a failed seduction and the fascination of an androgynous beauty.

Ravel’s songs reflect the enthusiasm for the Orient that had gripped fin-de-siècle Europe. Fleur Barron and Kunal Lahiry therefore found it particularly important to include a current perspective on this frequently adapted subject in their program. In 2024, they commissioned Kian Ravaei, a composer born in Los Angeles to Iranian emigrants, to write a contemporary counterpart. I Will Greet the Sun Again is based on a Farsi text by the poet Forough Farrokhzad, one of the leaders of the Iranian women’s movement. “Scheherazade’s experience of female captivity is not unlike that which Farrokhzad underwent, and which millions of Iranian women continue to endure,” writes Ravaei about his composition. The vocal line rises in intricate ornamentation above colorful harmonies and shimmering trills, in tribute to all women struggling for freedom. The following piece, Ananurhan by Zubaida Azezi and Edo Frenkel, also commissioned by Barron and Lahiry, addresses the same issues.

Ananurhan is based on a Uyghur folk melody; the Uyghurs are an ethnic group that is part of the Turkic language family, mainly living in the Xinjiang region today. Zubaida Azezi, who trained as a classical violinist, introduced Fleur Barron to Uyghur music several years ago. The text of the song is based on a real incident: in 1899, the Uyghur Ananurhan was abducted to the court of Lukchun, where she was forced into service as a concubine. Instead of giving in to the ruler’s demands, Ananurhan killed him and leaped from a window in desperation. The song is the lament of the Uyghur Jelil, who leaves behind his family to be united with his beloved in death. In Azezi and Frenkel’s composition, drumbeats are once again imitated by the prepared piano. The piece is “full of great tension: on the one hand there’s the text, which is an expression of despair, a kind of lament, on the other hand there’s the rhythm of a lively dance,” Kunal Lahiry says. “From this tension, we also learn something about the Uyghurs, their resilience with which they have retained their will to live in the midst of all the tragedies of persecution and banishment that they experienced over centuries, and about a culture in which, in existentially extreme situations, it is singing together that gives strength.”

*****

The two following works by Huang Ruo and Chen Yi take inspiration from Chinese opera, although their composers have been observing it from a distance: Huang Ruo, who studied classical Chinese and Western music in Shanghai, moved to New York in 1995; Chen Yi, who has been living in the U.S. since 1986, worked as a concertmaster and composer for the Peking Opera in her hometown of Guangzhou in the 1970s. In Monologue, she hearkens back to the declamatory and lament-like vocal lines and complex pitch structures of this traditional genre of Chinese musical theater. Huang Ruo refers to Kunqu, one of the oldest forms of Chinese opera, in Fisherman’s Sonnet, which he composed for Fleur Barron and Kunal Lahiry.

The program ends with two traditional Chinese songs. The Flower Drum Song from Fengyang gained recognition in the Western world due to its use in the 1937 film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth. The text speaks of the hardships suffered by people in the Anhui province who try to make a living by singing, despite being hit repeatedly by heavy floods. The lullaby from the Liaoning province in Northeast China is not only deeply rooted in the consciousness of many Chinese people—it also forges connections across continents. “When we performed this song at Wigmore Hall,” Fleur Barron recalls, “there was an audible gasp from someone in the audience, which showed us in a very touching way: here is someone who had recognized a melody that is part of their own identity in a classical concert, maybe for the first time.” It was a memorable experience for both artists: “It reinforced our belief that music around the world can not only give confidence to audiences, but also to all the musicians who appreciate Western classical music, but don’t feel supported by Western classical-music structures.”

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag

Anne do Paço studied musicology, art history, and German literature in Berlin. After holding positions at the Mainz State Theatre and Deutsche Oper am Rhein, she has been chief dramaturg with the Vienna State Ballet since September 2020. She has published essays on the history of music and dance of the 19th to 21st centuries and has written for Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, and Opéra National de Paris, among others.