Night of the Flying Horses

Night of the Flying Horses (2002)

Night of the Flying Horses starts with an Yiddish lullaby that I composed for Sally Potter's film The Man Who Cried, set to function well in counterpoint to another important music theme in the soundtrack: Bizet's Aria Je Crois Entendre Encore, from The Pearl Fishers. In her film Sally explores the fate of Jews and Gypsies in the tragic mid-years of the 20th century, through a love story between a Jewish young woman and a Gypsy young man. The lullaby metamorphoses into a dense and dark doina (a slow, gypsy, rubato genre) featuring the lowest string of the violas. The piece ends in a fast gallop boasting a theme that I stole from my friends of the wild gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks. The theme is presented here in a canonical chase between two orchestral groups.

 

Duration
8'00
Premiered
Minneapolis, MN
March, 2002
Premier Performance
by Dawn Upshaw, Minnesota Orchestra andAlan Gilbert, conductor
Commissioned
by the Minnesota Orchestra for its 100th anniversary
 
 

Appears on:

  • New Impossibilities – The Silk Road Ensemble (2007)

man who cried.jpg

This latest addition to Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road project is a thrill a minute. The most "famous" composer represented here is Osvaldo Golijov, whose "Night of the Flying Horses" fascinates with its sampling of "Je crois entendre encore" from Bizet's Pearl Fishers, while a high violin line and mournful cello alternate above it; the piece goes wild about two-thirds of the way through in the section called, appropriately, "Gallop." The other composers all offer equally fascinating pieces as well: the thrilling rhythms of Rabih Abou-Khalil's "Arabian Waltz"; Zhou Long's "Song of the Eight Unruly Poets" (what a title!), with its high-pitched strings (members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra take part in many of the works); the cinematic battle music of "Ambush from Ten Sides," featuring the twangy, acidic tones of the pipa, which ends in a true conflagration of violence, complete with shouting; and "Vocussion," a brief, cool piece with scat singing and boom-boxing. There's more — much more — in this portrait of world music, and it's all wonderful.

— Robert Levine

 
Joe Fitzgerald