Garcia Lorca

“Meine Seele weinte” ("My soul wept") is the title of the versatile mezzo-soprano Natalya Boeva's new CD featuring lieder spanning a wide variety of epochs, languages, and styles. It is a co-production of GENUIN and the Bayerischer Rundfunk. Together with her piano partner Polina Spirina, the winner of the ARD International Music Competition in Voice 2018 immerses herself in an exciting selection of works by the great lied composers Franz Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Karol Szymanowski and the contemporary Russian composers Alexander Labyrich and Dmitri Smirnov. Arguably no other genre can probe the most intimate human feelings of deep sorrow and quiet hope as profoundly as the lied. Natalya Boeva and Polina Spirina trace the most subtle emotions and the most imperceptible color shifts of these treasures with utmost precision – a moving interpretation of an extraordinary program!

"Music-life (or life-music, which is the same thing)": thus wrote the young Nono to Karl Amadeus Hartmann in 1953. That same year he wrote to Hermann Scherchen about "the very beautiful reality of our strong unity in life and in music." This desire for unity of art and life, which was still possible - indeed, perhaps necessary - after the war, found an ideal correspondence in Federico Garcia Lorca and his "barraca." It was this simple stage on a truck with which Lorca traveled across the country for a time; he wrote and staged plays for it on behalf of the young Spanish republic.
…in Der rote Mantel the obvious, "audible" political intentions are very much in the background; there are no choral, rhythmic slogans or anything similar. Nono's ballet on the "erotic hallelujah" is rather a bizarre kind of chamber play that seeks intensifications of Garcia Lorca's intangible, poetic images. And yet at the same time, of course, it is an homage to Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by the Falangists.

Peter Hirsch from the attached booket