Messiaen: Harawi (Chant d'amour et de mort) Anna Molnár & László Borbély

• Olivier Messiaen (1908 - 1992): Harawi (Chant d'amour et de mort):
• 1 Messiaen: I. La ville qui dormait, toi 02:25
• 2 Messiaen: II. Bonjour toi, colombe verte 03:15
• 3 Messiaen: III. Montagnes 03:19
• 4 Messiaen: IV. Doundou tchil 04:24
• 5 Messiaen: V. L’amour de Piroutcha 04:41
• 6 Messiaen: VI. Répétition planétaire 06:06
• 7 Messiaen: VII. Adieu 07:29
• 8 Messiaen: VIII. Syllabes 06:39
• 9 Messiaen: IX. L’escalier redit, gestes du soleil 06:23
• 10 Messiaen: X. Amour oiseau d’étoile 05:24
• 11 Messiaen: XI. Katchikatchi les étoiles 01:56
• 12 Messiaen: XII. Dans le noir 07:38
• Total Runtime 59:39

Info for Messiaen: Harawi (Chant d'amour et de mort)

In many ways, Harawi occupies a special place in the oeuvre of Olivier Messiaen. On the one hand, it places extreme demands on the two performers, often not in a purely technical sense, but even more in a spiritual, psychological sense. At the same time, to highlight the work's humanly testing difficulty is to miss the point. The other aspect of the piece's uniqueness is the composer's style, which is a mixture of surrealism and sacredness, and which makes his musical language always unique and instantly recognisable. And although Messiaen always represents a kind of transcendence, his compositional thinking is, in contrast, finitely organised. The aforementioned surreal flavour also stems from the seemingly irreconcilable nature of this totally organised 'chaos' and the sound of sacral rapture. (The composer intends the sixth - Répétition planétaire - movement to give a vision of the chaos of the universe.)

The lyrics of the Harawi ('yarawi', a characteristic genre of Peruvian folk poetry, originally related to tragedy) was written by Messiaen himself. In addition to the above, Messiaen, who boasted literary ancestry, was obviously keen to create a kind of 'Gesamtkunstwerk' (synthesis of the arts) - in which he was 'responsible' for every detail of his work, including not only the music but also the text, which is written in French, but also makes extensive use of Kechuan idioms, which are included for their particular sound. These lyrics can therefore hardly be called song lyrics in the traditional sense, but rather metaphorical dream descriptions, or 'celestial suggestions' if you like, whose meaning lies precisely in their artistic ambiguity. These magical texts project the often 'too noisy loneliness' of the human psyche. They express in a symbolic-surrealistic voice all that cannot be expressed in words. In this respect, one of the most direct sources of inspiration for the work was the oil painting 'Seeing is Believing (L'Ile Invisible)' by the English surrealist painter Sir Roland Penrose. (László Borbély)

Anna Molnár, mezzo-soprano
ászló Borbély piano

Anna Molnár
Vocal artist, mezzo-soprano Anna Molnár is „a versatile artist with a stirring voice, who likes pushing boundaries and participating in experimental performances”. (Dániel Mona)

Contemporary-, baroque-music, lied and opera are equally important in her career.

At the Liszt Academy’s Oratorio and Lied department Anna was the student of Andrea Meláth. She graduated in 2017. In 2016, with the help of the European Erasmus Program, she spent one semester at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague, where she worked with Rita Dams and Gerda van Zelm.

She is a singer of the Bavarian Radio Choir, lead by Peter Dijkstra and Sir Simon Rattle.

As a soloist Anna performed several times at the Grand Hall and Solti Hall of the Liszt Academy, at Palace of Arts (Müpa Budapest), at the Budapest Music Center, at FUGA Budapest and at the House of Music Hungary.

New music has an important place in Anna Molnár’s life. She performs and records music of living composers regularly, among them a lot of world premieres written exclusively for her. Significant and challenging 20th century pieces like Ligeti Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, Webern 4 Lieder op. 12, Schönberg Pierrot Lunaire, Boulez Le Marteau sans maître, Berio Folk Songs, O King and Sequenza III, Steve Reich Music for 18 Musicians and Tehillim, or Messiaen Harawi are also on her repertoire. She is a regular guest artist at festivals like CAFe Budapest Contemporary Art Festival, Transparent Sound New Music Festival, VårFEST of Voxlab in Oslo, the Ligeti Festival Transylvania, Budapest Spring Festival, Liszt Fest, The Night of Music of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Valley of Arts Festival, the Armel Opera Festival and the Haydneum Festival of Sacred Music.

As a soloist she performed with the following conductors, directors, musicians among others: Makoto Akatsu, János Bali, Rolf Beck, Guillaume Bourgogne, Tamás Bubnó, Michael Chance, Gábor Csalog, Gergely Dubóczky, Dénes Gulyás, András Keller, Gergely Kesselyák, Martin Rajna, Guido Roveda, Jon Svinghammar, Jutka Szokol, László Tihanyi, Gregory Vajda, György Vashegyi. As a chamber singer she performed with Herbert Blomstedt, Péter Eötvös, Ádám Fischer, Iván Fischer, Philippe Herreweghe, René Jacobs, János Kovács, Ádám Medveczky, Zubin Mehta, Krzysztof Penderecki, Helmuth Rilling, etc.

Anna was awarded the Annie Fischer Scholarship three times (2016, 2017, 2018) as well as the scholarship of Bank of China in 2017. Between 2020 and 2024 Anna was teaching classical voice at the jazz department of the Liszt Academy Budapest, and from 2022 she is a doctorate student. 

Booklet for Messiaen: Harawi (Chant d'amour et de mort)