It was hard to say exactly how Baïlèro started. Through the wintery, still air, there rose a concoction of flute and violin, piqued by an oboe, its shrill, familiar voice filling the corners of Woolsey Hall like a sort of homecoming.
From her place on the stage, Amanda Hall moved just slightly forward, taking in the cavernous corners of the hall that would soon be filled with rapt, slowly swaying bodies. The oboe ushered her in. She began:
“Pastrè dè délaï l’aïo, As gaïré dè buon tèms? Dio lou baïlèro lèrô, Lèrô lèrô lèrô lèrô baïlèro lô.”
Lucy Gellman Photo
And suddenly, some 21st-century iteration of Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret was dancing nimbly between the oboes and French horns, dipping past the cellos and under the conductor’s bow, until he sidled up with Hall herself, one ear pressed close to her mouth.
“Pastré lou prat faï flour, Li cal gorda toun troupel. Dio lou baïlèro lèrô, Lèrô lèrô lèrô lèrô baïlèro lô.”
Around the stage, his narrative unfurled: the rolling, rocky hills of Puy-de-Dôme and Cantal, across which a dour shepherd ambled with his flock. The meadows were in bloom. Green grasses. A glib narrator.
Unorthodox, maybe, but par for the course with Hall and Canteloube at the helm. Tuesday night, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra prepared for its upcoming concert Parfum de la Nuit, to be held Thursday evening at Woolsey Hall. While the concert will include Ravel, Berlioz, and Bizet, Hall’s performance is, in some ways, the show’s coin of the realm.
That’s partly because Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne (Songs of Auvergne) are a smooth, gorgeous set of five pieces in Occitan, a French pan-dialect that lives between a patois and a romance language. For Hall, a professional soprano whose voice contains swooping, billowy realms of creamy silk and the laughing edge of a soft-balled question, the pieces presented a new challenge she yearned to tackle: a linguistic code asking to be broken, and then be sung. Musical detective work, in need of a singing Sherlock.
“I’m absolutely thrilled to be coming back for this. It’s my first time working with these pieces, and I’ve done a lot of research on the language, a lot of studying these movements, based on folk tunes from one specific region in France. It’s not one of the main languages that you’re taught to be fluent in when you are training, so you you go to everybody and you have to figure it out,” she said.
The result of her investigation into the pieces, which NHSO Management Director Katie Bonner Russo likens to “the fine wine” of musical performance, is a series of songs that jump from playful to deeply yearning to tender within the space of an hour, backed with stringed and brass voices that heighten their deep feeling.
Hall doesn’t have secrets to the concert’s success. Neither do members of the orchestra, although they hope the cold won’t be too much of a deterrent after record-breaking sales for Handel’s Messiah at the end of 2014. They do have hopes that decoded pieces like the Chants, as well as the remainder of the concert, will become a little more accessible to audiences.
“It’s every one of our obligations to reach out in one way or another … keeping the art form alive in a real, societal presence sort of way,” Hall explained.
Then she turned to her sheet music, and went back to cracking a code.
The New Haven Symphony Orchestra presents Parfum de la Nuit Thursday. Tickets and additional information available here.
