FULL LILACS (George Walker) London 2022 Simon Rattle Nicole Cabell
Popular Singers in this Opera Recording
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Lilacs
- Composer: Walker George
- Libretto: Walt Whitman
- Venue & Opera Company: Barbican Centre, London, UK
- Recorded: 2022
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Nicole Cabell
- Conductor: Simon Rattle
- Orchestra: London Symphony Orchestra
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Marquee
- Date Published: 2022
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: yessubs, ensubs
- Video Recording from: Marquee FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Sir Simon Rattle conducts Dvořák, Schumann and George Walker, in a concert filled with feelings that run too deep for words.
Music starts where words leave off – and in George Walker’s Lilacs, the poetry of Walt Whitman is simply the starting point for an even more fantastic emotional journey. It’s the beautiful, haunted heart of a concert that begins with Dvořák’s playful homage to the New World, and ends with Schumann’s most personal (some might say greatest) symphony.
For Sir Simon Rattle, it’s all about what lies behind the notes on the page – whether Dvořák’s warm-hearted nostalgia, or the musical love-notes to his wife Clara that Schumann threaded throughout his Second Symphony. And at the centre of it all, there’s a rare British hearing for Lilacs. This ravishing exploration of longing and loss won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and if you’ve heard Nicole Cabell perform at the Royal Opera, you’ll know that she makes every note tell a story.
Quote from Wikipedia
Lilacs for voice and orchestra (or Lilacs) is a musical composition by George T. Walker Jr. (1922–2018) that was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The work, scored for soprano soloist and orchestra, was the unanimous choice of the Pulitzer prize jury. Walker was the first African-American composer to be awarded the prize.
Walker set the 1865 poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, by poet Walt Whitman. Whitman wrote the poem as an elegy to President Abraham Lincoln after his death on 15 April 1865. The composition was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Faye Robinson on February 1, 1996.[4] “The unanimous choice of the Music Jury, this passionate, and very American, musical composition…has a beautiful and evocative lyrical quality using words of Walt Whitman.”