REPERTOIRE

Robert Schumann: Paradise and the Peri. Secular oratorio, Op. 50 (1843)

Artists

Lina Johnson and Johanna Roda Falkinger, sopranos
Marianne Beate Kielland, mezzo-soprano
David Fisher, tenor
Manuel Walster, baritone
Nicolas Brooymans, bass
La Capella Nacional de Catalunya 
Lluís Vilamajó, choral director
Le Concert des Nations
Lina Tur Bonet, concertino
Luca Guglielmi, assistant director
Jordi Savall, director

Programme

The last drop of a hero’s blood, the last sigh of a girl sacrificing herself for love and a tear from the cheek of a repentant sinner. This is how a peri, a creature from Persian mythology, having been expelled from Paradise, tries to regain her place by offering the gift most dear to heaven. This story was an obsession for Romantic composers, who saw a symbol of artistic genius in the protagonist. It is based on one of four great narrative poems in Thomas Moore’s Lalla-Rookh, published in 1817. Schumann’s daring composition created a new genre for concert halls, a kind of secular oratorio in which the sacred and the popular coexist in the semi-human and semi-divine world of the Peri. The score traces a delicate network of inspired melodies, while developing a new type of recitative, allowing us to travel musically to India, Egypt and Syria, as seen through nineteenth-century eyes. This concert, conducted by Jordi Savall, will raise the profile of a work as beautiful as it is unknown: Schumann’s Paradise and the Peri.