Olivier Messiaen's HARAWI Comes to the Wallis

Harawi realizes Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting, hour-long song cycle for voice and piano in a newly physicalized and dramatized dimension featuring AMOC* Company members soprano Julia Bullock, pianist Conor Hanick, choreographer/ dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, with direction by Zack Winokur. Moving from duet to quartet, this production breaks open Messiaen’s cycle, connects the relationship between movement and music, and grapples with the intensity of love and loss in the human experience.
 
Harawi has a single performance at the Bram Goldsmith Theater at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on Tuesday, October 1 at 7:30pm. Harawi, an AMOC* production, is presented at The Wallis in collaboration with the Ojai Music Festival.
 
GRAMMY winner Julia Bullock hails from St. Louis and is among the leading sopranos singing today.  Pianist Conor Hanick hails from Iowa City and is among the most inquisitive interpreters of music new and old.  The two come together to perform Messiaen’s heartrending Harawi, inspired by Quechua (an indigenous Andean language of Perú and Bolivia) poetry, joined by two of the most imaginative dancers/choreographers of our time, Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber.
 
Bullock said of the piece: “Harawi explores dichotomies: life and death, pain and joy, spirituality and sensuality, sacrifice and preservation, fulfillment and loss. Messiaen seems to be asking from a place of personal grief: how do you stay connected to someone you loved while the accumulated memories of your relationship begin to fade or drift? How do you recover and move on?”
The New York Times said that Julia Bullock is “one of the singular artists of her generation, a singer of enveloping tone, startlingly mature presence and unusually sophisticated insight into culture, society and history.” 
 
Director Peter Sellars, a frequent collaborator with Bullock, told the Times, “This is who we’ve been waiting for.  You see someone who’s not just a vehicle, but an agent of change. She’s actually moving the whole art form into a new relevance, both by completely rehabilitating existing repertoire and by commissioning a set of things that need to exist. We’re hearing the voice of a new generation.”
 
Anthony Tommasini said in the Times said that Hanick is a “brilliant” pianist whose “technical refinement, color, crispness and wondrous variety of articulation benefit works by any master.”
 
This concert is of special interest to area classical music enthusiasts as it brings to fruition a long-awaited project originally scheduled at the 2022 Ojai Music Festival, led by AMOC*. Harawi was intended to be a centerpiece of that year’s Festival but had to be cancelled when one of the artists tested positive for Covid. It took two years for all of the artist schedules to align once more and the Ojai Music Festival brought the project to the Wallis as a collaborative presentation.
 
Robert van Leer, Executive Director and CEO of The Wallis said, “In our first collaboration with Ojai, we are proud to bring the 2022 Ojai Music Festival’s reschedule performance of Harawi to our audience. Julia Bullock, one of the leading artists on American vocal music, is a powerhouse and will surely steal the stage.”
 
Messiaen’s life circumstances, relationships, and beliefs always seem to infuse his
compositions, oftentimes with explicit symbols and associations. Messiaen began to write this song cycle when he returned home after being a prisoner of war during World War II. Shortly after his return, the mind and body of Claire Delbos –– a fellow musician, source of inspiration, and his wife –– had begun to slowly degenerate, including total amnesia, and a new love partner was entering his life.
 
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd, Beverly Hills. To purchase single tickets, subscriptions and for more information, please call 310-746-4000 (Monday – Friday, 10 am to 6 pm) or visit TheWallis.org.

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