Moonlight melodies

07/18/11 17:27
(http://www.klassa.bg/)

by Petar PLAMENOV

26 July (Tuesday), 2011

Start: 18:30;
Entrance: 5 BGN
Moonlight 1
Boris Hristov Music Center
Address:
Sofia, 43 Tzar Samuil Str.
Phone: 02 987 35 92
Cast: Rada Toteva - Nosikova [soprano],
Stanislava Marcheva [mezzo-soprano],
Boryana Lambreva [piano]

In the program: Debussy, Fauré and Delibes

Achille-Claude Debussy (August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918) was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he is considered one of the most prominent figures working within the field of Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions.Debussy is not only among the most important of all French composers; he was also a central figure in European music at the turn of the twentieth century.

His music is noted for its sensory component and how it is not often formed around one key or pitch. Often Debussy's work reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. His music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to twentieth century modernist music. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as Symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.

Clair de Lune - Moonlight - is the most famous movement of Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, and comes from a poem that means “moonlight”. The harmonies build until a small world of associations gathers like the shadows of dark branches on grey moonlit grass, and a crescendo is reached, but it is a reverse crescendo, because instead of a crashing climax, instead an immense, quiet, but vast octave echoes in the deep bass, afloat underneath the accumulated cumulus chords tiptoeing down from the sky, like lighthouses that silhouette the clouds: endless, soundless. So the river flows, the moon glows, and from harmony emerges humanity.

Debussy found Verlaine’s poem, Clair de Lune, to be the verbal epitome of his composition, and so adopted its title.

MOONLIGHT

Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where there are charming masks and masques
Playing the lute and dancing and half
Sad under their fantastical disguises.

All in chanting in the minor mode
Of conquering love and the fortunate life,
They don’t have the air of believing in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,

With the calm light of the moon, sad and good,
Which makes the birds dream in the trees
And the fountains sob with ecstasy,
The huge, svelte fountains among the statues.