UIESH

Program notes

About the Work

UIESH is new: this is its first performance. The title is a word in Innu-aimun, the language of the Innu people of eastern Quebec and Labrador, and means ‘somewhere’. Bernard Foccroulle has set poems by Joséphine Bacon, an Innu poet born in 1947 at Pessamit on the north shore of the St Lawrence, who writes in both Innu-aimun and French. ‘Uiesh / Quelque part’ is also the title of a collection she published in Montreal in 2018. The concert uses English translations by Jessica Moore.

The London Symphony Orchestra and the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence commissioned the piece; the orchestra’s season announcement names a Frankfurt radio orchestra as a third partner. The connections are old ones. Foccroulle directed the Aix festival from 2007 to 2018, years in which the LSO was one of its resident orchestras, and before that he ran La Monnaie in Brussels, where Antonio Pappano was his music director. Since leaving Aix he has given most of his time to composing, and most of what he writes is for voice with orchestra or ensemble, or for his own instrument, the organ.

What to Listen For

Nobody outside the rehearsal room has heard this music yet, so there is little that can honestly be promised. What is known is the scale, about 22 minutes, the forces, solo voices with full orchestra, and the source: short, spare poems by an elder who spent her earliest years on the land with her family and has written much of her life in a city. Bacon’s verse deals in few words and wide spaces, a long way from the perfumed abundance of Bouchor’s lilacs in the Chausson. It will be worth noticing how a composer steeped in the organ repertoire, and in decades of running opera houses, handles that plainness, and how the words carry in English.