Marie-Laure Garnier & Celia Oneto Bensaid - Songs of Hope: Spirituals, Poulenc, Messiaen / NoMadMusic Audio CD 2022 / NMM105

UPC 9780201379624 / 5051083178426  

Total Playtime 52:27

Forming a powerful duo on stage for several years, Marie-Laure Garnier and Celia Oneto Bensaid have recorded their first album for NoMadMusic. An ingenious mix of works by Olivier Messiaen, Francis Poulenc and Negro-spirituals, this album sings of the sacred and of hope to celebrate a mixed society, rich in its multiple cultures.

Tracklist:

01 Walk Together Children

02 Messiaen Action de grdces

03 Ride On, King Jesus!

04 Deep River

O05 Poulenc Main dominée par le coeur

06 My Good Lord's Done Been Here

07 Poulenc Priez pour paix

08 Nobody Knows de Trouble I’ve Seen

09 He's Got the Whole World in His Hands

10 Messiaen Le collier

11 Poulenc Les anges musiciens

12 He Never Said a Mumbalin’ Word

13 Poulenc Nous avons fait la nuit

14 Sometimes | Feel Like a Motherless Child

15 De Gospel Train

16 Messiaen Priére exaucée

17 Weepin' Mary

18 Wade in the Water

In this program, we wished to establish a dialogue
between the songs of Francis Poulenc and Olivier
Messiaen on the one hand and Negro spirituals on
the other, around their shared themes: the sacred,
hope, and the major hardships experienced by man.
Since the beginning of our duo in 2011, French songs
have been at the heart of our repertoire. But we have
'adopted' the additional repertoire of Negro spirituals
to explore on our musical journey, even if they may
appear somewhat marginal to classical musicians.
We owe thanks to Jeff Cohen for giving us a leg up!
French songs form a cherished repertoire which
we have studied under famous specialists such as
Anne Le Bozec, Véronique Gens, Stéphane Degout
and Susan Manoff. We love to explore their poetic
richness and the demands of their colours, and
we try to recreate them as ‘simply’ as possible. It
would seem redundant to overdo it, since the texts
(literary masterpieces) are already highlighted by
rich harmonies and powerful, nearly omnipresent
tone painting. The lyrics are by Maurice Carême,
Charles d’Orléans, Paul Éluard, and Olivier Messiaen.
Their strongly contrasting poetic worlds establish
a multi-faceted corpus around our themes.
We have here the sound universe of Francis Poulenc
in his monk’s character (the reviewer Claude Toscane
defined the composer of both Le Dialogue des
Carmélites and Les Mamelles de Tirésias as ‘a monk
or a hoodlum’, characterized by ‘great gravity due to
his Catholic faith together with imagination and a
carefree spirit’), and that of Olivier Messiaen, from

whom we took three excerpts from his Poems for
Mi (a work written for his first wife Claire Delbos).
He wrote the poems in the spirit of Pierre Reverdy.
His texts contain vocabulary taken from Saint-Paul,
the Gospel, the Psalms, and the images are drawn
from the landscape that surrounded him at the
time: the Alps, mountains, lakes and the Dauphiné
countryside. While The Necklace is very melodic,
Messiaen explored the ‘tracts’ of plainsong in the first
and last songs (Action de grâces and Prière exaucée):
the text is spoken quickly (not as a recitative, but
rather as psalmody) and the important words - the
key words (‘Halleluia’, ‘Joy’) - are vocalised at length.
Compared to these French songs, the Negro spirituals
may seem very different at first. Yet these songs, that
men and women deported from Africa to the United
States of America sang in the cotton fields between
the 17th and 18th centuries, are filled with spirituality,
fraternity and hope. They are drawn from the Old
Testament (particularly the Book of Exodus) and tell
the story of the emancipation of the Hebrew people.
This Biblical reference carries the hope of the slaves to
also be freed from the yoke of their oppressors. Today,
their songs invite us to reconsider our collective
history, and to question the world we live in.
Although the Negro spirituals, which were the
slaves’ only means of expression, were typically
sung a cappella, here we have chosen voice/piano
arrangements by the American composers Harry
Burleigh (1866-1949), Hall Johnson (1888-1970),
Moses Hogan (1957-2003), and Mark Hayes (1953-).

All these composers studied at major American
conservatoires. Three of them were Afro-Americans
who played important roles in introducing Negro
spirituals to European composers: Burleigh, for
example, introduced Dvořák to Afro-American
music, particularly when the latter became
interested in the very identity of American music,
while Moses Hogan, well-known for his wonderful
arrangements, worked hard to have the Spirituals
included in the repertoire of choir singing. As a result,
these arrangements of Negro spirituals possess an
aesthetic shared with certain songs of the classical
repertoire. Just as gospel and jazz are the legacy
of a blending of popular Afro-American music
and the so-called erudite European music, these
Spirituals were reworked with a more contemporary
eye by the composers who arranged them.
Thus these songs, with their totally hybrid style,
at the crossroads of humanity, are like a mirror for
us: a mixed society, rich in its multiple cultures. At
any rate, that is what we have chosen to present.
Even if music has a purely aesthetic meaning,
is it not also a bridge upon which everyone can
meet and understand each other regardless of
our culture? In light of the hardships we all face,
let us come to understand that our fates are
linked, and our differences strengthen and enrich
us. Let us never allow them to separate us.
– Marie-Laure Garnier & Célia Oneto Bensaid

4