Description
Aura is a setting of Emily Berry’s poem from collection Stranger, Baby (Faber & Faber, 2017). It was commissioned by The Gesualdo Six and Matilda Lloyd and first performed by the artists at St John’s Smith Square on 9th October 2020.
Duration: 6 minutes
“Richard Barnard’s Aura is… a triumphant setting of Emily Berry’s deeply moving poem, taken from her collection Stranger, Baby. The collection is centred on Berry’s sense of loss at the death of her mother. Her text for Aura uses a distinctive layout as a visible representation of a fractured emotional state with unpunctuated lines split into two columns. The columns become intermittently closer as the poem progresses, and they join in the affecting realisation that ‘I could see past/the shimmer that separates the living/& the dead I knew there was nothing/no separation’. Barnard’s inspired conception of how to realise the poem in music was to divide the voices between the columns and use the trumpet as bridge between them. As usual, words and explanations only get one so far – you have to hear this to believe how profoundly an emotional experience it is. When the lines I’ve quoted are reached, the repeated setting of the word ‘shimmer’, with the full choir coming together, singing richly and warmly, and Lloyd’s trumpet playing a joyful flourish is beyond moving. I might have thought Berry’s poem unimprovable until I heard this setting and performance.” Review from MusicWeb International
