A spectacularly virtuosic tour de force for solo female singer. Award-winning composer Ana Sokolovic chooses her favourite love poems from many different languages and sets them to music. The composer includes romantic love, love for one’s mother, love between children, love for a daughter, love shattered by grief and love for a lost brother. This fully staged production includes poems from Michael Hartnett, Paul Éluard, Émile Nelligan, Vasko Popa, Miroslav Antic, Laza Kostic, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shakespeare, Catullus,Walt Whitman and Amarusataka.
Interspersed with the love songs are four movements that Sokolovic calls ‘doves’, in which the performer sings, whispers or speaks the phrase ‘I love you’ in a total of 100 languages. After a very successful premiere in Toronto in March 2008 at the Canadian Opera Company’s Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, the opera is presently touring nationally and internationally.
Music – ANA SOKOLOVIC
Music Directors -
DÁIRINE NÍ MHEADHRA & JOHN HESS
Choreography and Direction – MARIE-JOSÉE CHARTIER
Lighting – BONNIE BEECHER & GLENN ÐAVIDSON
Forces – 1 FEMALE SINGER
“...a magnificent work… The geographic, linguistic and emotional expansiveness of Sokolovic’s texts carries over into her music, which goes far beyond conventional operatic use of the voice…
Phillips went beyond virtuosity and entered into the various states of love with purity of heart as well as voice, and conveyed an exhilarating freedom and daring as she leapt from language to language - especially in the dizzying “I love you’s”…
A full day later, I was still shaken by her performance… Sokolovic has touched the primeval heart of civilization … (and) breathes new life into Canadian music theatre.”
– The Globe and Mail
(March 2008 premiere, director Brent Krysa)
“The biggest applause at the Biennale was for Love Songs. The phenomenal performer was mezzo-soprano Lauren Phillips who returned five times for curtain calls to an enchanted audience – more curtain calls than any other performer in the entire Biennale. The perfect concept of composer Ana Sokolovic mirrored the virtuosity of the performer. Once again it was clear that we don’t need a lot of ‘everything’ to make a quality project – only one good concept and a good performer, and we will remember Love Songs for a very very long time after this Zagreb Music Biennale.”
– Zagreb Vjesnik večernje izdanje, April 2009
PHOTOS: JOHN LAUENER
