Join pianist Eunmi Ko in the Florida premiere of Vera Ivanova’s In the deep heart’s core!

This piece incorporates into music four poems: The Echo, by Anna Akhmatova, In the Fog, by Hermann Hesse, Wind, by Boris Pasternak, and The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by W.B. Yeats.

All fours poems were recorded by the authors themselves (and are in public domain, freely available online). One of the goals of this commission is to incorporate not only the text and its content into the music, but also the original recorded readings by the authors. Compositionally, each movement will translate the literary source to original musical content and implement the poetic form of each poem on a structural level, applying the shape, intonation, and rhythm of each verse (taken from the original readings done by the authors) to the musical form, reflecting the read poems’ rhythmic patterns of phrases and gestures.

The poems chosen for this cycle are joined together a the common theme: contemplation upon human existence and its reflection in nature. For all four poets, the images of nature were not merely an idyll, but a refuge from political oppression, which changed the course of their lives dramatically. Nature reflects their inner thoughts, hidden “in the deep heart’s core” and provides a consolation, expressed through the prism of lyricism inherited by Pasternak and Akhmatova from the Russian “Silver Age” style, through the elements of psychoanalysis in Hesse’s poem (influenced by Carl Jung’s methods), and through the Romantic nationalism of early Yeats.

The cycle will start with a shorter introduction (The Echo) to the central movement, based on Hesse’s haunting poem Im Nebel (In the Fog), and continue with a fast third movement (Wind), which might incorporate folk-song elements, as suggested by Pasternak’s imagery of a lullaby, sung by the winds, and conclude with a finale (The Lake Isle of Innisfree), reproducing the structure (but not the form) of a sonata cycle. The performers will have a choice of including the poems into the program notes (provided by the composer), playing back before the performance of each movement readings of the poems, recorded by poets themselves (all four recordings are available and in public domain), or projecting the poems on a screen, or leaving the text of the poems out and using only the cycle’s title (and subtitles of movements) to show the literary connection between music and text.