Details

Year: 2023
Duration: 15’
Instrumentation: soprano and orchestra
Texts: Federico Garcia Lorca, translated by Sarah Arvio
Commissioner: Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival
Premiere: April 2023
Ashley Robillard and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra,
Jeffrey Milarsky, conductor

Gold Girl / Dark Doves (2023)

Movements

I. Of the Gold Girl
II. Of the Dark Doves

Program Notes

Gold Girl / Dark Doves is based on two texts written by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and translated by Sarah Arvio. The poems are the last of his collection of “Casidas” inspired by the forms of Andalusi-Arabic “Qasidas” which he discovered while growing up in Granada, a city still influenced by a near-millennium of Andalusi (or “Muslim-Spanish”) history. Lorca wanted to repurpose this ancient form using contemporary and personal ideas through the artistic lens of “Duende,” or a heightened state of emotion and expression which shaped much of his output. 

These two poems are among the last Lorca ever wrote before he was killed by nationalists during the Spanish Revolution in 1936. He was only 38, and in the months before his death, these poems explored intimate and personal ideas that revealed Lorca as his most vulnerable self. 

Rich imagery and symbolism permeate these texts and illustrate a familiar interplay of “light versus dark.” However, over the course of these two poems, this contrast slowly inverts: “Of the Gold Girl” includes images of shimmering light that transforms into a very chaotic and macabre world, while the inevitable darkness in “Of the Dark Doves,” portrays a feeling of solemnity and peace. 

Permissions

“Of the Gold Girl” and “Of the Dark Doves,” translations of the poems entitled “De la muchacha dorada,” and “De las palomas oscuras” by Federico García Lorca, c. Sarah Arvio. Excerpted from her volume Poet in Spain (2017) by permission of Sarah Arvio and Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.