![]() “But the circus people make me feel so relaxed and capable. “Sure, it’s taking a lot of nerve,” says Tynan. Little did she imagine that, a few years later, she’d be the performer attempting those extremes. It seemed to me that the grotesqueness, the extremes of what the performers’ bodies can do, fitted with the images in the poetry.” By a canal there’s a circus space, and as I stood there watching I could hear the music. “I was learning the piece in Paris and was walking around trying to take in different images and fill my imagination with pictures. Long before she was approached by Leslie, Tynan found herself associating the music with the circus. “When Struan mentioned the circus idea to me for the first time,” says Tynan, “I thought ‘of course, why didn’t we think of this before?’” Fanciful perhaps, but it has all continued to make sense. “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage” (“I alone have the key to this savage parade”). Consider, too, the sentence Britten chose from one of the poems to be the motto for the cycle. Britten, too, while he was completing the song cycle in 1939, was living in Brooklyn in the house of Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous burlesque artist. One of Rimbaud’s poems – although not one of the handful Britten chose to set – is about a circus coming to town.Īnd then there’s the fact that Rimbaud, having renounced poetry at only 21, lived for a spell in Stockholm where he sold tickets for a French circus. In Phrase she talks about stretching ropes from tower to tower. At the beginning of Parade, the soprano sings – in Wyatt Mason’s translation – about “musclebound goons”. Connections and echoes revealed themselves. The surreal quality of Rimbaud’s language and images marries well with the hyperreality of the circus, as do the colours of Britten’s sound palette, the movement in his score. ‘The performers can feel the vibrations through my feet when I’m singing’ - Sarah Tynan and the circus performers for Les Illuminations at Aldeburgh festival. “I’d been doing a lot of circus work and I suddenly realised this is it! Les Illuminations is a circus piece!” But it’s the intangible quality of energy, clarity of line, and visionary quality of each work that is the tonal glue.īritten’s song cycle is a work Leslie has long dreamed of staging, but none of the ideas he considered felt right – until a eureka moment at Aldeburgh itself while he was working on Britten’s Owen Wingrave. France links Rimbaud and Debussy Britten’s love of and admiration for the older French composer was such that his teacher Frank Bridge gave him the score of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande as a 21st birthday present. ![]() Rimbaud’s poetry was written when he was 19 or 20. Youth: all the pieces were created when the composers were young men. Crudely, there are seven movements of music, seven dreams, and in the second half she wakes up and tells us what her illuminations, or visions, have been.” “Sarah is in bed dreaming for the whole of the first part,” says Leslie, “so what we see is like her dreams. She is, however, always at the centre of things. The usual translucent sound from the Grieghalle in Bergen is another plus for this release that should continue the process of broadening familiarity with Eriksmoen's work.Tynan is on stage throughout, but only sings in Les Illuminations, which forms the second half. This brings the curtain down on the recording in most convincing fashion, and it's worth the price of admission on its own. Conductor Edward Gardner, leading the Bergen Philharmonic, helps with the program shaping, taking the Canteloube songs languidly so as to highlight the new edge in the other Britten French song cycle, Les illuminations, composed in 1939 to texts by Arthur Rimbaud. The Canteloube pieces fit with them beautifully, and nobody else has thought of this program. The early Britten chansons are extremely clever fusions of Debussy's style and those of the composer's English teachers. Do give the album a second look, however. It is mostly French or English singers who tackle all these works, and soprano Mari Eriksmoen's French has a bit of a Norwegian accent (whether the same is true of Canteloube's Occitan texts is uncertain). Benjamin Britten's Quatre chansons françaises of 1929 aren't recorded terribly often and are sometimes classed as juvenilia, and the market was not clamoring for a new recording of selections from Canteloube's Chants d'Auvergne. This 2021 Chandos release hardly seems promising at first glance.
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