Voyages

Voyages
Saturday, May 25th, 7:30pm
 at the Noe Valley Ministry

Teatro Mistral presents ‘Voyages’ a journey through the sensuous, pictorial music of Maurice Ravel for voices and instruments at the Noe Valley Ministry. Including a performance of the extraordinary Chansons madécasses. Premiered at the Salle Erard in Paris on June 13th, 1926, this haunting, impassioned erotic and exotic song cycle stands apart from Ravel’s earlier vocal or chamber music in both the provocative subject matter of its text and the dramatic, emotionally charged nature of its musical setting. Though the first and third songs luxuriate in the sensual longings of ardent lovers, the center one tells a detailed story of the desecration wreaked by European invaders, the long and terrible carnage imposed and the final freedom won by the natives. This incandescent tryptich for piano, cello, flute and voice is a musical voyage filled with languid delicacy and smoldering fire!

Also included: Ravel’s exquisite final composition, Don Quichotte a Dulcinée, which was originally composed and offered as the score to the now classic film ‘Don Quixote’ immortalized by Feodor Chaliapin (though Ibert’s music was ultimately used) his Chants Populaires in 4 folk dialects, the Vocalise en forme de Habanera in an arr. for solo flute and the plaintive Kaddisch/L’enigme eternelle transcribed for cello solo.

A note from the artistic Director……

I often wonder where my life might have led if I had not, on a sunlit southern California afternoon in my late teens, encountered the music of Maurice Ravel!  As anyone knows who has tried to do it,  it is very, very difficult to describe what happens when you come across something so extraordinary, so intriguing, so deeply inspiring that it demands that, as the poet Rilke says “You must change your life”!  For a baffled mixed-race teenager unsure of her place in a confusing and often overwhelming world, the music offered a mysterious answer to my dilemma –- a place of imaginative beauty to explore, an open land filled with mystery and revelation.  A door opened to me on that day, one that later filled with many other composers and musics, many extraordinary people from many worlds. That afternoon began an unnamed journey. And, as journeys often do, it led me places that I could never have imagined and have never once regretted. A musical life. A life in music. Through it, I learn and continue to learn what it is to be human in this curious world of ours. Continue to engage what I know to be the best in us. Continue to grow and transform. This concert, then, is a tribute to the composer that changed my life on that sunny afternoon, what his music offered me, which I now have a name for – Hope. The hope that music offers of beauty and understanding…..love and transformation for us all.

Voyage with us through the music of Maurice Ravel!    

Vismaya Lhi – Artistic Director/soprano
Rachel Warner – contralto
Tristan Robben – verdi baritone
Amy Likar – flute/piccolo
Amy Brodo – cello
Dwight Okamura – pianist