MESSIAEN’S HARAWI
10th Singapore Lieder Festival
Sing Song Club
Victoria Concert Hall
Dance Studio
Wednesday (24 August 2022)
The Singapore Lieder Festival, named in these pages as the nation’s best kept secret, made a comeback for its 10th edition with a single-night event. The Sing Song Club gave the Singapore premiere of twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen’s song-cycle Harawi (1945), part of his love-and-death trilogy inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The two other parts include the massive Turangalila Symphony, performed by the SSO in 1994 and 2017, and the choral Cinq Rechants, which has yet to receive its premiere here.
Harawi comprises 12 songs in French (written by Messiaen himself), based on Peruvian Quetcha poetry, music and folklore on the said subject of love and death. The songs were shared by tenor Adrian Poon and soprano Jennifer Lien, partnered by Singapore’s very own Graham Johnson, the intrepid pianist Shane Thio. The music bears similarities with Turangalila albeit on a smaller scale, with its shared musical idioms of violent dissonances and paradoxically comforting harmonies, and by its use of recurring themes.
Birdsong abounds, notably the green dove (colombe verte) representing the forbidden love between protagonists Piroutcha and Toungou. Their eternal love can only be truly consummated in death, by the latter’s decapitation amid cosmic levels of upheavals. Erotic and gory in equal measure, this was what made Harawi the cult favourite it is. While Turangalila was the extroverted crowd pleaser, Harawi was the introverted sleeper of Messaien acolytes.
Both singers were excellent and well-matched in their selected songs, reflecting a kind of yin and yang in opposing yet complementary viewpoints. Poon was the grounded terrestrial spirit of sleeping cities (La ville qui dormant), mountains (Montagnes) and the realm of animals (monkeys and the ubiquitous birds) while Lien revelled in the mystic ideals, love (L’amour de Piroutcha), parting (Adieu) and celestial forces, the sun (L’escalier edit, gestes de soleil) and stars (Katchokatchi les etolies). Both conveyed the outward ruggedness and inner beauty of the music very convincingly.
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| Doundou tchil, now repeat it 19 more times... |
Besides singing in idiomatic French, repetitive onomatopoeic words also stole the show, such as the recurring doundou tchil and katchikatchi sung by Lien (representing a dance with ankle bells and grasshoppers respectively), and Poon’s shrieking cries of ahi and o (Repetition planetaire) as well as the monosyllabic pia (Syllables). Their synchronisation with Thio’s dynamic pianism in these rhythmically complex and extremely tricky numbers were a marvel to behold from start to end.
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| Ahi...ahi....O.... (Repetition planetaire) |
Held in the high-ceilinged and mirrored space of Victoria Concert Hall’s Dance Studio, with its sonorous and not-too-reverberant acoustics, the performance was very well received by a small but extremely appreciative audience. The floor sprinkled with multi-coloured origami pieces (possibly celebrating the recent repeal of 377A) representing birds, grasshoppers and stars made a very nice and atmospheric touch for a landmark in Singapore music history.
Whence will the next performance of Harawi take place? Given that Messiaen’s Quatour pour le fin du temps and Turangalila, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Bernstein’s Mass, Wagner’s Walkure, and the complete melodies of Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc (thanks also to Sing Song Club) are no longer strangers to Singapore audiences, one can hazard to say that cannot be too long from now, and coming from yet another adventurous group of musicians. Yes, a revolution of sorts has begun.
1 comment:
Hi Dr Chang, the Cinq Rechants was premiered locally by The Philharmonic Chamber Choir many years ago.
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