with Nieuw Amsterdams Peil
“Kristia blew my mind when she presented this program. Daring repertoire, exciting collaborations, extremely precise performance and unique voice”
– Aart Strootman, composer
“Cypriot-Dutch singer Kristia Michael is equally at home in early music and contemporary repertoire. During this recital, she sings not only music by the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen but also pieces written especially for her”
– Dag in de Branding
The sound installation by Kristia Michael and the hymn by the 12th-century German abbess and visionary Hildegard von Bingen set the tone for the Dutch premieres of the chamber vocal works by the Cypriot composers Yannis Kyriakides and Andys Skordis. Both works were composed for the soprano Kristia Michael and premiered last November with MusicAeterna. The search for oblivion and catharsis concludes with Lotófagos I by the Austrian composer Beat Furrer. The performance reinterprets 21st-century music drawing inspiration from medieval ritual aesthetics with attention to the nature of sound and silence, taste for the newest technologies and language features of contemporary electronic music, unhurried meditative manner, and interest in extreme vocal practices.
Program
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179): O rubor Saguinis
Samir Timaj Chi: Unknown *DUTCH PREMIERE
Yannis Kyriakides: Now we send you this message *DUTCH PREMIERE
Andys Skordis: SHE…NEN *DUTCH PREMIERE
Beat Furrer: Lotófagos I
Read the interview with Dag in de Branding here.
Yannis Kyriakides: Now we send you this message
The source of this text is a letter written in 1426 by the Mamluk Sultanate Barsbay to King Janus, the Lusignan ruler of Cyprus. It represents the moment the Lusignan rule in Cyprus had come to an end, almost certainly due to their arrogance and hubris.
The Lusignan court had produced a treasure trove of Ars Subtilior music, the French-Cypriot Codex (MS. Torino J.II.9). Ballads from the manuscript are encoded into musical fragments, played by the string quartet while the text is sung in Greek.
Andys Skordis: SHE…NEN
SHE…NEN (“Abyss” in Japanese) explores a rite of passages, from fragility into intensity and to a state of catharsis. The whole ritual resembles an erotic procedure that one enters and explores. Ends with a conclusion or a beginning of a new cycle
Beat Furrer: Lotófagos I
“We were in a desert surrounded by our own image which we did not recognize. We had lost our memory.”
Lotófagos (Lotus eaters) alludes to the companions of Odysseus, who ate lotus in order to forget. The text by José Angel Valente set to music here is about lost memory […] Forgotten are thus sorrow, joy and the knowledge of death, that which first gives birth to the human conception of time. The desert is the place and the symbol of not remembering, an “other” state, which can be paraphrased in so many ways: as the alien, oblivion, nonbeing, death. ~Marie Luise Maintz
Kristia Michael 