Review | Greater than the Sum of its Musical and Mythic Parts

In an onstage Q&A session following last week’s performance of the unique Olivier Messiaen song cycle Harawi, intrepid and deep-thinking soprano Julia Bullock (see interview here) claimed that her approach to the challenging, hour-long piece required a combo of “cool mind, [and] very warm heart.” That tidy summation spoke volumes about the dynamism and triumph of her masterful achievement, embodying the mystical, multi-lingual, and musically diverse poetic tapestry of love, loss, nature, and existential questioning compacted into a 12-song epic.

As it happens, this Harawi production — presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Ojai Music Festival (OMF) and clearly a high point of the current “serious music” year in Santa Barbara — would have been the highlight of the 2022 Ojai Festival, had Bullock not contracted COVID and been forced to cancel her trip out west. OMF’s musical direction that year belonged to the ambitious young consortium AMOC (American Modern Opera Company), responsible for facilitating Bullock’s vision for the piece.

This AMOC production expands from the standard voice and piano foundation (with the ever-insightful Conor Hanick at the piano) to include a dance component, with dancer/choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith and dancer Or Schraiber — and Bullock herself occasionally drawing on her own background in dance to interact with the bodies in motion. Bullock, who never ceases to amaze with her incisive marshaling of technical and emotional feats in performance, asserted a subtle and nuanced presence from — and in — the cool mind and warm heart of the cycle.

A bit of back story illuminates the origin saga of Messiaen’s opus, which is steeped in the composer’s own distinctive modernist musical language but also draws on the influence of Andean ritual and culture (“Harawi” is a Quechuan terms for a genre involving Andrean song, poetry, and movement). The full title of Messiaen’s semi-hidden jewel is Harawi: Chant d’amour et de mort (“song of love and death”) written in 1945, soon after he was released as a prisoner-of-war (the period during which he composed his classic Quartet for the End of Time).

At the time, the composer’s then-wife was afflicted with a degenerating mental and physical state, and Messiaen had met his soon-to-be-wife and long-standing collaborator Yvonne Loriod. Messiaen resisted performing the work until his first wife had passed. Harawi takes its place in the fairly limited repertoire of vocal music in Messiaen’s otherwise vast oeuvre.

Bullock seems an ideal artist to bring new life and depth to this music. Her résumé has included an emphasis on the varietal nature of contemporary music along with early music (she’ll return to Santa Barbara to perform with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Lobero on January 21) and other repertoire. Her controlled tonal and expressive capacities flexed in the right directions while dealing with the morphing musical terrain of a score blending primal energy and Messiaen’s signature Modernist elegance and enigma.

Bullock consistently drew us into the mystical folds of Messiaen’s Harawi world, as in the hypnotic blur of “The Staircase Repeats, Gestures of the Sun” (“Gaiety flourishes in the arms of the sky./Fan-shaped bird song./Of sky, of water, of time, the staircase of time”). With symmetrical grace, the cycle opens with “The Village That Slept, You” and closes with the dreamily benedictory finale of “In the Black,” closing with “The village that slept …,” (La ville-qui dormait …) its ellipses suggesting timelessness, love, and death.

On this night, Bullock and Messiaen transformed Campbell Hall into a house of magical thinking.