Images of border detention inspire new work for Tucson Song Fest

A Grammy-nominated composer and one of the world’s leading tenors will premiere the fifth new work in the Tucson Desert Song Festival’s Wesley Green Composing Project.

Peruvian composer Jimmy López Bellido will be in the audience when tenor Michael Fabiano and his longtime accompanist Laurent Philippe perform the world premiere of “Quiet Poems” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15. The recital, presented by Arizona Opera, closes out the winter leg of the 2024 Tucson Desert Song Festival.

“I think the piece has something important to say both musically and in terms of the text, and I think that Michael is just the ideal vehicle for this piece,” López said during a phone interview last week from his San Francisco area home.

“Quiet Poems” reunites López with his go-to librettist Nilo Cruz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuban playwright with whom he collaborated on two of his defining works: his 2014 opera “Bel Canto,” commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago through its Renee Fleming initiative; and “Dreamers,” the 2019 oratorio for soprano, mixed chorus and orchestra that recounted the stories of undocumented young people facing the possibility of deportation to homelands they had never known.

López and Cruz, who also will be at Thursday’s recital, built the oratorio around interviews in 2018 with several Berkley “dreamer” students. It was at a time when then-President Trump was leading the charge to nullify President Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program. DACA allows a reprieve from deportation for undocumented adults who had come to the U.S. as children with their parents and grew up in the States.

During the pandemic, López said Cruz was so moved by media images of immigrant children being held in cages that he revisited some of the poems from “Dreamers.” He also wrote new ones that took a deeper look at the notion of children being held in captivity not only along the border but in war-torn regions like Ukraine. He showed the poems, more than 30 of them, to López in fall 2021 and proposed doing a project that followed “Dreamers.”

“When he showed those (poems) to me, I felt like, yeah, this is something we should explore further,” López said.

López selected four poems — “The Orchid Boy,” “Tango For A Rapist,” “Lullaby for the Insomniac Child” and “The Girl of the Clouds” — for his “Quiet Poems” song cycle, written for Fabiano. Throughout the process, he worked closely on revisions with the 39-year-old Fabiano, whose career has taken him to nearly 90 international stages including every major operatic stage.

Fabiano had reached out to López a couple of years ago after watching a video of one of the composer’s symphonic poems.

“I asked him if he had any music for tenor and piano,” said Fabiano, who hasn’t done a lot of contemporary music in his recitals, but said “I’ve really wanted to.”

Fabiano and Philippe worked closely with López on the song cycle, tweaking some areas to better fit his voice and learning the tonal structure that included delayed harmonies where the vocal line comes in after the piano leads the harmony.

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“Jimmy writes progressive but also easy for the ear at the same time,” Fabiano said. “It’s kind of a hybrid. It’s structurally tricky.”

López said that a year into the project, everything was coming together with one exception: they needed a commission.

Enter Tucson Desert Song Festival.

A board member had seen López’s “Bel Canto” in Chicago and suggested commissioning the 45-year-old, who had been nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2022 for his violin concerto “Aurora.”

“George (Hanson) comes in the picture and says is there any projects you might have in mind? Any singers you want to work with?” López recalled of the call with the song festival coordinator. “The stars aligned.”

“I’m very excited about this piece,” Hanson said. “It looks like a really compelling work. What’s exciting about this is that they have all worked on the piece.”

“I hope (the audience) comes away feeling that the music is impactful and the text is new and interesting,” said Fabiano, making his Arizona debut. But Fabiano, whose career is largely centered in Europe, said he has long heard of the Tucson Desert Song Festival through friends who have participated including Philippe.

“It’s a veritable institution,” he said. “I’ve known about it a long time.”

Fabiano and Philippe will join Hanson, López and Cruz for a conversation at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 14, about the creative process that it took to bring “Quiet Poems” to life. The conversation will be in Holsclaw Hall at the University of Arizona School of Music, 1017 N. Olive Road, and admission is free.

Tickets for Thursday’s recital, also at Holsclaw Hall, are $40 through tucsondesertsongfestival.org.

In addition to López, the Tucson Desert Song Festival has tapped prominent American composers Richard Danielpour (“Songs of Love With Loss,” 2020), Jake Heggie (“What I Miss the Most,“ 2021), Jennifer Higdon (“Summertime Music,” 2022) and Ricky Ian Gordon (“Marvin Gaye Songs,” 2023) for its commissioning program.