Rubies in Crystal: 'Crepusculo' by Yachar: A distant flame of hope in the dark dream of endings.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

'Crepusculo' by Yachar: A distant flame of hope in the dark dream of endings.

Yasar's Crepusculo, or Twilight, consists of 3 songs from an opera based on Lord Byron's poem, Darkness. Yasar, in his album notes, offers the first lines:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:

[My response based on notes written while listening to 'Crepusculo' by Yachar]

Yachar has tackled a massive tableaux and offers us a grand and deep and lonely cry for life. The soprano sings as the angel of our heart. We call to the soul of the universe for forgiveness. We love. Love sings in the tragedy. Our spirits sweep on love's beauty.

The Celtic harp, acoustic guitar, and other delicate instruments, complex rhythms upholding the operatic voices, the music Yachar has composed, it's uplifting joy, offers a distant flame of hope in the dark dream of ending.

A calamity overwhelms before which we are helpless. This is the power of the dream - a nightmare from which we cannot awaken. A spectre of unrelenting darkness, loss, loneliness. In the midst of the desolation of everything, the loss of the sun, all life ends, the stars wander in the void, even the waves of the ocean die, people become savages before everything expires into eternal death. Only darkness has no need of aid, and it is darkness that remains, as Byron writes in his great poem, "Darkness...-She is the Universe."

Though throughout these songs there is a relentless, inexorable movement, something unstoppable, a great dark shadow that travels with the beauty, as Byron relates his apocalyptic dream, "The world was void...seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless- a lump of death- a chaos of hard clay," and so I hear perhaps marimbas in the background of the last piece that sound like delicate bones rattling, a reminder.

Death is ever our accompaniment in this beautiful graceful gift of life. Yachar's musical art sings of this truth with great passion, sensitivity.