Fleur Barron's name resonates in the world of classical music in a very peculiar way. Since the Schubertíada awarded her its Franz Schubert Prize – to her and the legendary Brigitte Fassbaender – and since her debut in Aix-en-Provence and at the Paris Philharmonie with Esa-Pekka-Salonen, this mezzo-soprano born in Northern Ireland but Raised in China and the United States, to a British father and a Singaporean mother, she has made a name for herself beyond the opera houses with her daring recitals. Between German lieder, French mélodie and English poetic song, Barron introduces some Chinese song, completely deactivating the idea of exoticism of our European ancestors.
She is a global singer capable of containing all cultures and building an indestructible bridge between East and West. The Life Victoria festival in Barcelona opened the 2021 edition with her, accompanied on piano by Julius Drake, and now circumstances have led her to repeat the move (today, 8:00 p.m. Sant Pau Modernist Venue), as she has had to replace a convalescent Fatma Said.
“In Hong Kong I studied piano and violin as a child and we played Bach and the European masters, but, although a large part of the family lived in Singapore, my upbringing was very Chinese. And yet it did not occur to us with my teachers to take a look at the Asian repertoire ”, she says on the phone from Lake Majore, where she is enjoying three days of parenthesis. "It was during the pandemic in New York that, pushed by the identity issue that is so much talked about, I saw that, despite my multicultural background, the classical music I make is exclusively Western."
In Hong Kong he had daily Mandarin lessons, he tells, and sang local folklore. One of her uncles took her to the opera… “To be honest, I didn't like it, but now that I'm older I'm very curious to reconnect with the influences of my cultural background. I have investigated these non-Western traditions and I have been surprised by the vastness of the repertoire, not only of living authors but of those who at the beginning of the s. XX, with colonization, used Asian poems with Western-influenced melodies. And I love it".
It has now expanded its non-Western repertoire and incorporates, for example, Philippine songs from the colonization era, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the music sounds "very Spanish," but the texts are in Tagalog and they are pieces wonderful. "They were very nationalistic songs in their day, about how to process the occupation." Barron says she is also interested in Central Asian and Central American pieces.
But the program that he does at Life Victoria this Wednesday is diverse, with some Asian pieces, but they fit in with the idea that runs through this edition of the festival: nostalgia and the passage of time. "For me, nostalgia has been looking back, observing my childhood. I am interested in the intersections, in the resonances between music of different cultures, languages and traditions, and I observe that there are many more juxtapositions and points of connection than you imagine. And That's because in the last two centuries, with globalization, the contact between cultures and influences is much greater.
In the program there will be, thus, from American song to Lieder and mélodie, but also a couple of pieces by the Chinese-American composer Chen Yi who has lived through the counterrevolution. "They're written in Mandarin and based on Chinese opera, so they sound like improvisation." And after those dramatic pieces she will interpret a very sweet Chinese lullaby that belongs to the folklore of the Asian country.
