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The sea was always a part of my life since I was born. Haifa, my home town, lies on the Mediterranean seashore in the north of Israel. Mount Carmel governs it and from his pick you can see the beautiful bay. The color of the sea together with the blue skies of Israel form a deep blue which is so familiar to me.
When Maestro Justus Frantz suggested to me the poems of Tomas Morales, the great Spanish poet who was born and lived in Gran-Canaria, he marked various possible poems for me to choose between them.
I chose the first part of "Oda al Atlantico" which tells about the significance of the sea to the poet.
Everybody has his own dream of those huge blue waters which form the sea or the ocean. The ocean of Gran-Canaria is familiar to me only through Tomas Morales's poems. I decided to concentrate not on the description of the ocean but on its dream. The dream that each of us has of the sea.
I feel now that I got to know the ocean of Gran-Canaria and that this ocean became one with the ocean or the sea of my dreams and my childhood.
The atmosphere of the composition is therefore the dreams, the feelings of the poet or the singer or…the composers as he/she thinks about the sea, watches the sea and the imaginations takes him or her wherever it wants.
The singer, a mezzo-soprano, sings certain verses from the poem which I chose. The wind instruments, especially the oboe, English horn and the flute have significant role, almost as important as the singer.
I did not make any attempt in this piece to imitate the noises of the sea, its waves, it's storms. I did try to paint, in music, the feelings that one has when looking at the sea and dreaming about it. These feelings are sometimes stormy, sometimes dreamy, funny or sad.
I call it an Aria for voice& orchestra but as it is written for Gran-Canaria and inspired by it, I called it CanAria for Voice & orchestra.
Ella Milch-Sheriff.
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