Human Voice (Nicosia)

Musicians
Soloist: Katerina Miná, soprano
Conductor: Orlando Jopling
Stage Director: Stuart Barker
Stage & Costume Designer: Andy Bargilly
Cyprus Symphony Orchestra

Programme
D. Milhaud: Le boeuf sur la toit
A. Roussel : Le marchand de sable qui passe
F. Poulenc: "La Voix Humaine" (One-act Opera for one character, Libretto by Jean Cocteau)

D. Milhaud: Le boeuf sur la toit

Darius Milhaud is especially recognized for his striking, yet diverse output, which encompasses a variety of genres and styles. He is also known for his involvement in Les Six and his experimentation with polytonality and jazz. During the First World War, Milhaud served as an attaché at the French delegation in Rio de Janeiro. After the war, Milhaud returned to Paris, and still inspired by the Latin American music, he composed Le boeuf sur le toit (The Bull on the Roof), after a popular Brazilian song. As the composer confessed, "I couldn't help but assembling popular melodies, tangos, sambas and fado and transcribing them with a rondo-like theme that would recur between each successive pair". Milhaud subtitled the work, "Cinéma-Symphonie", as he believed it would be used by Charlie Chaplin in one of his films. Instead, it was used by Jean Cocteau in an absurd stage production with acrobats, and clowns from the Médrano Circus.

A. Roussel : Le marchand de sable qui passe

Even though Albert Roussel is not as famous as his contemporaries, Debussy or Ravel, he was quite prolific in his output, which combined both traditional and progressive elements. Reflecting Roussel's early style, Marchand de sable qui passe (The Sandman) Op. 13, was composed in 1908, two years after the composer's First Symphony and shortly after Roussel's marriage to Blanche Preisach. Arranged for the uncustomary instrumentation of string quartet, harp, flute, clarinet and horn, the work included incidental music from a tale by George Jean-Aubry. Unlike Roussel's large-scale works, the four-movement Op. 13 is wonderful in its textural simplicity and strong contrapuntal elements. A work of unsophisticated beauty and lyricism, the work also reveals the influence of Debussy's L'après midi d'un faun, as well as D' Indy's use of thematic recurrence as a means of uniting all the movements.

F. Poulenc: La Voix Humaine

Synopsis:
A young woman (simply referred to as Elle) answers the phone and begins a conversation with her lover of five years. He has abandoned her and is to marry another woman the following day. This is the last time they will speak to each other. During the conversation we learn that the woman has tried to commit suicide. The phone service in Paris being notoriously poor during that era, they are interrupted several times during the agonizing conversation. She veers from hysteria to calm running through every emotion. Fear, incoherence, suffering, lies fill the conversation, but the essential truths are never spoken... finally the receiver drops lifelessly to the ground and the connection is broken. She wraps the flex around her neck and goes to bed whispering words of love into the earpiece.

Overview:

"This ‘lyrique tragedy in one act', as the composer himself termed it, brings together a number of elements that are by nature anti-theatrical. Yet we are indeed dealing with an opera here. This forty-minute ‘drama of the ego' à la française depicts a character living through her drama of desperation in a situation produced by modern life, since there is no letter, no real encounter, but a virtual confrontation through the medium of the telephone, which has become an explosive device, the means both of connecting and of splitting up with the loved one, tenuous thread destined to be broken. The orchestra constitutes a tapestry of sound whose role is to convey the emotional climate and to increase dramatic density while at the same time creating unifying elements by playing on recurrent motifs. The entire musical structure is organised around a series of dramatic ‘phases' (the lie, the poisoning, etc.)"

Text by Hervé Lacombe

The event is part of the Kypria International Festival 2009.