September 2019 Ultima festival Oslo
Du Yun: Where We Lost Our Shadows (2019)
Oslo Sinfonietta
Sofia Jernberg – mezzo soprano
Ali Sethi – male voice
Shayna Dunkelman – percussion
Christian Eggen – conductor
Khaled Jarrar – film
An urgent new work by New York based Pulitzer Prize winner and Chinese composer Du Yun investigates the plight of refugees, in myth, history and the violent present.
Where We Lost Our Shadows is a powerful and timely new work for orchestra, including disturbing film sequences of a Syrian family crossing the Aegean Sea, shot by Khaled Jarrar, a Palestinian visual artist based in Ramallah. His footage shows just the most recent example of human migration that Yun’s composition explores, as well as expanding into a vision of human movement as a perpetual factor in world history.
Du Yun’s emotive music itself follows the migration of a musical language – devotional qawwali music that travelled from medieval Muslim India to Central Asia, Bengal, and South Asia – and incorporates text by the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan.
Together with Oslo Sinfonietta, Sofia Jernberg (Norwegian jazz/experimental singer), Ali Sethi (Pakistani vocal star) and New York percussionst Shayna Dunkelman perform this urgent and important musical testament that shifts between political reality and allegorical representations of global exodus.
Produced in collaboration with Oslo Sinfonietta.
At Kulturkirken Jakob