MESSIAEN: HARAWI

Harawi is a cycle of twelve songs scored for soprano and piano composed in 1945. Harawi (known to Spanish speakers as yaravY) designates a song about a fated love that ends in the death of both lovers. Messiaen remarked that oit is the story of Tristan and Isolde.o The surrealistic text of Harawi is MessiaenAEs own. Using the musical structures Messiaen had created for Harawi, he built massive phrases in these songs, expanding space and time, creating extreme tenderness, vastness, clarity and abysses. In Harawi both lovers are not only human, but beings, which transform again and again. Destruction, pain, death, creation, joy, dance and love are not final u they are all everchanging particles of our interwoven cosmic existence. Already chosen as ONE OF THE BEST RELEASES OF 2019 (from a pre-release review copy) by Lynn RenU Bayley of Art Music Lounge: "This stunning album a features the still-young and somewhat outrU German soprano Sarah Maria Suna From the first notes of La ville qui dormait to the dying piano sound in Dans le noir, this is a performance that will absolutely rivet youa This clearly goes straight to the top of performances of this unusual and somewhat difficult song cycleao Sarah Maria Sun is one of the foremost singers in the contemporary music scene with a repertoire of more than 900 compositions from the 20th & 21st centuries, including more than 320 world premieres. She was nominated for singer of the year by Opernwelt in 2017 for her role as Elsa in SciarrinoAEs monodrama Lohengrin and as Gwen in 4.48 Psychosis by Philip Venables. From 2007-2014, she was first soprano of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, a chamber ensemble of 7 singers that has been one of the worldAEs leading pioneers of contemporary music for 30 years.'