Tsurara is inspired by the Tsurara Onna, the icicle woman of Japanese folklore: a figure who appears in winter and vanishes with the thaw.
Rather than retelling the myth, the piece explores the emotional climate she suggests: beauty held in tension, intimacy edged with cold, presence always on the verge of disappearance.
The music unfolds within a world of suspended breath. The orchestra plays sempre non vibrato and at the softest of dynamics, creating a soundscape that feels frozen, fragile and foreboding. Bright percussion glints through the texture like light catching upon ice.
Eventually, a brief, brittle quickening skates upon the stillness: bright, pointillistic, unstable; it threatens to slightly crack the frozen surface of the music.
Then the work’s most intimate moment emerges: a passage where something a little warmer, melting and more vulnerable reveals itself.
Later, like voices heard through falling snow, a soprano chorus begins to sing: bright, insistent, then distant.
They deepen the hypnotic song of Tsurara.
Then the song fades, slowly rising and dissolving into the cold night air.
What remains is a feeling of something glimpsed and too quickly lost: an ethereal beauty of frost, longing, and gentle breath.
Tsurara Onna
Tree withering cold
Frost fingers tap my window:
Light, light, so lightly;
I feel your ice mist stir me…
Strangely welcome in the night.
In winter you come,
To stay with me in the dark:
Feeding on my warmth,
Sharing your seductive cold;
We entwine and slowly merge.
Skin withering cold
Lips finding and kissing me
Through the night softly;
I feel my hot life flowing
Toward your rime-crusted heart;
Soul withering cold;
Your arms are the freezing clouds
That carry me up,
Up toward the aloof stars,
Where you and I disappear.
CML
