Partial Lunar Eclipse – Lori Laitman – Harmonium Choral Society
Moondance – March 2023
Under the direction of Dr. Anne J. Matlack
Harmonium Choral Society
Morristown United Methodist Church, Morristown, NJ
David Davis, piano
Yale-educated @vocal-composer Lori Laitman has composed multiple operas and choral works and hundreds of songs, setting texts by classical and contemporary poets (including those who published in the Holocaust). Her music is widely performed internationally and throughout the United States, to substantial critical acclaim. The Journal of Singing wrote, “It is difficult to think of anyone before the public today who equals her exceptional gifts for embracing a poetic text and giving it new and deeper life through music.” Lori is also the sister of our good friend at Morris Arts, Lynn Siebert!
Lori’s most famous choral piece is Vedem, an oratorio that tells the story of the boys of Terezin and their secret journal Vedem (Czech for “In the Lead”). The Three Feathers is a one-act children’s opera based on a tale by the Brothers Grimm, given a feminist take. The opera The Scarlet Letter was recently premiered by Opera Colorado and released by Naxos. If you explore Lori’s unofficial biography, you can read the inspiring story of how she balanced a music career and raising three children, and how she came to vocal writing and art song fairly late in that career. (http://artsongs.com/informal-biography)
Lori provides these notes:
Partial Lunar Eclipse sets a poem by Sri Lankan poet Anne Ranasinghe. The song was composed in 2007 for solo voice with piano, the first of two songs of a short cycle entitled And Music Will Not End, commissioned by the Lyrica Society of Word Music Relations. In 2018, the Alexandria Choral Society under the direction of Brian J. Isaac, and the Virginia Choral Society under the direction of Sarah Gallo, co-commissioned me to re-envision the song for chorus with piano accompaniment.
The poem reflects the mystery and timelessness of the universe, our place in that universe, and Anne’s realization that she was nearing the end of her life. I found the poem to be particularly well-suited to a choral adaptation, with the colors of the additional vocal lines and the richness of the choral sound helping to create a sense of the vastness of the universe. The piano part proceeds along its own orbit, slightly dissonant and repetitive. Above this the voices glide with several instances of word painting: for example, small descending motifs associated with the word ‘slipping’; a quickened pace as the ‘orb’ begins to ‘sail its lonely journey’; and a climax with a long, loud choral chord emphasizing the idea of a ‘link with the universe’. As the song draws to a close, the original pacing returns, and the voices and the accompaniment drift off unresolved, cementing the idea of ‘no return’.
“No return” could also be descriptive of the poet’s early life. Anne Ranasinghe (1925-2016) was born Anneliese Katz in Essen, Germany. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, Anne’s parents sent her to live with an aunt in England, as they feared for her safety. Her parents and all other relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Later, Anne left England when she married a Sri Lankan doctor, becoming a citizen there in 1956. Sri Lankan blogger Uditha Devapriya sums it up thus: “the theme she resorted to the most: the thin, fragile line between the past and present, between uditforgetting and remembering (https://udithadevapriya.medium.com/anne-ranasinghe-and-the-torment-of-forgetting-492715f01a05).”
Full program notes available on our website: http://www.harmonium.org/
Video/audio production: http://www.showfocused.llc
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