LA PALOMBA: SONGS OF SEFARAD by Isabelle Ganz - WORLD PREMIERE, 02/05/2022

Описание: "La Palomba” weaves Sephardic melodies with middle-eastern inspired original music composed by Isabelle Ganz for the Apollo Chamber Players and special guests, Cecilia Duarte (mezzo-soprano), and Jesús Pacheco (percussion).

PROGRAM NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER:

The Apollo Chamber Players commissioned a work from me "based upon Sephardic songs". As a composer, this is a quandary for several reasons:
1) I didn't want to simply arrange one song after another, creating a "medley" and 2) most of these songs come from a tradition that emphasizes melody and rhythm over harmony. How can one write a string quartet with no harmony? My solution was to create the beginning and ending of the work based upon drones, which IS in the tradition, using both extant Sephardic melodies and original ones, and to create music for all the interludes and for the setting of the poem "Siniza i Fumo" (Ash and Smoke) by the living poet, Avner Peretz.

The first 4 songs deal with flirtation and courtship. The lyric "Dame la mano, tu palomba" (Give me your hand, my dove) returns melodically at the end of the work. Beginning with the instrumental passage just before "Siniza i Fumo", the poem written by Avner Peretz, the work turns very dark, leading to the last song by Violette Mayo Fintz and her sister Sara Mayo Menasche, survivors of Auschwitz from the island of Rhodes. Their poem was published in the book "And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust".

The lyrics of all the songs are in Ladino, the language of the Sephardic Jews that is a mixture of 15th century Spanish and Hebrew, with many words in Turkish, Arabic, and French as well.