Soy mucho mas
poems by Eyda T. Machin

dedicated to Marie-Ange Todorovitch

 

1. Soy mucho mas

2. Amo en ti

 

It is the meeting with the poet Eyda Machin, native from cuba, a generous and enthusiastic woman, who made me want to write these new melodies. One evening, after a concert, around a table and a drink, Eyda read me her poems. I was caught by these words, seduced by the strength of the images …

These poems speak about love and death. I wrote the cycle of melodies “Un brasier d’étoiles” few years ago on love poems by Alain Borne. I found it interesting to compose another cycle of melodies on the same theme on love, but with woman words :

“The poems confront the reader with the feelings of a woman who knows the abysses of human existence. The coexistence of love and death manifests itself in a great richness of images which offers us more than mere appearances. He discovers an expressive woman who constitutes the essential force of this poetry. A vast territory of the erotic language is used “.

These poems are written in Spanish (and edited in trilingual version: Spanish, German, French). I chose the Spanish words. I wanted, by the musicality of the words, to capture the musical and rhythmic colors of the Spanish and Latin American music.

A freedom of writing where lyricism is present with the same time rhythmic and sensitive approach (Benito Pelegrin)

 

Presse
Marie-Ange on fire

Two premiere by the composer Lionel Ginoux, present in the room, on two Spanish poems by Eyda Machín also present; two commissions by Marie-Ange Todorovitch, always concerned to defend today’s music, whether in contemporary operas from Marseille to the Opera house du Rhin (L’Amour de loin, Colomba, Quai ouest), passing through Salzburg.
Lionel Ginoux, lives and works in Marseille. Young, he already has an abundant work behind him played in France and abroad, for orchestra (symphonies, concertos), choir, instrumental ensemble, chamber operas (Vanda, Médée Kali, whose creator, Bénédicte Roussenq, a sumptuous soprano, attends the concert) and numerous melodies and, among others, a recent record of his Brasier d’étoiles by soprano Jennifer Michel with Marion Liotard on piano. Without being subservient to any school, his work, with very diverse forms, is characterized by a freedom of writing where a lyricism at the same time rhythmic and sensitive.

The first text of Eyda Machín, Soy mucho más, ‘I am much more’, gave its title to the recital and develops this phrase repeated at the beginning of verse, anaphora. It was a long complaint that in the sixteenth century it would have been described as the blazon of the divided female body, declined in “mouth, eyes, breasts, legs, hands, tongue” with the difference that all valorizes by parts the body, not of the lady of the courtier lover but the concrete physical woman, is here defended by the narrator in protest against the “dirty desires” of the profaner who devalues ​​her seems to reduce it to the object, against which, rebellious, it affirms “I am much more than …” (but one wonders why it tolerates it). Another shorter anaphora of some verse, “I am …”, will be the almost pantheistic, cosmic affirmation of what she believes to be. Poem of a great breath, with plays of sounds and rhythms.

Without knowing Spanish (but the poetess reads him the poems and translate them), Ginoux starts from the word, the sound material, more the sound than the meaning, a sensual approach, seduced and driven by the rhythm and the music of this language which he exalts without any fault of accent. As he confided to us, he first weaves at the piano an atmosphere of chords with three sounds in both hands, consonant or dissonant, often in strong contrasts. In an ostinato, which is at first endiablé, very feverishly dancing, Cuban finally, he poses a polymodal melody and the voice, in a natural ambitus, raises its vehement protests in a kind of fight against the effervescence of the piano before defeating it in the second affirmative part, to reduce it almost to silence, to harmonious tablecloths, to cadences that are largely arpeggiated, gorged with emptyness, which seem to acquiesce gently to the absolute final triumph of the woman.

The second poem, Amo en ti, ‘I love in you …’, still built on the anaphora of these first words, is a moment of peace in which the voice of Marie- Angel shimmers in delicacy the fruity facets of her velvety timbre in the medium, silky in the high, moiré, in a delicious pleasure of the art of singing and the word, of phrasing, in a remarkable diction.

Benito Pelegrin