After performing each month as singer/songwriter-in-residence with the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center for years, Azul Barrientos decided to take a break.
A year and half later, Barrientos will re-emerge Friday evening at Stable Hall performing new original songs with chamber music quartet Agarita.
“I’m so excited to do this collaboration,” Barrientos said of working with Agarita, which regularly performs in collaboration with poets, visual artists, dancers, guest instrumentalists and composers.
Agarita pianist and music director Daniel Anastasio said his approach to the hourlong program is to foreground Barrientos by creating musical moods to frame her original songs. The program will open with her song “Cascabel,” then move into a poem, followed by the first movement of Road Movies by U.S. composer John Adams, which Anastasio described as “awakening” with “wide-eyed wonder.”
Poetry read by Barrientos throughout the program will be a mix of ancient Mexican poems, folkloric verse and her own lyrics, woven between and with classical compositions.
Both Anastasio and Barrientos described the program as a “life journey,” which specifically for Barrientos represents a period of reflection and healing she recently experienced.
“It’s an inner journey that takes you to different spaces, and connects you to the simple gifts in life. Silence, nature, water, things that we kind of take for granted,” she said. “But that inner journey allows you to really appreciate what’s out there, just by existing.”
An important moment in the musical journey begins in the womb, with a fetus singing a lullaby to its mother before embarking on her own life journey.
As translated from Spanish by Barrientos, the lyrics to her song “Arrullo Para Mi Refugio” begin:
Dear Mother, I’m traveling
I have arrived from my star
You welcome me with your whole being
Thank you, my refuge
“It’s a tribute to the love, care, and connection that begins even before birth … and the unbreakable bond that forms between mother and child,” Barrientos said.
She said Anastasio programmed a piece of complementary music she has come to adore, Une barque sur l’océan (A Boat on the Ocean) by 20th-century French composer Maurice Ravel.
Anastasio described the piece as an important turning point in the program, representing a life moment of isolation, having left the confines of one’s family to strike out on one’s own, and finding oneself alone and adrift on a vast sea.
For Barrientos, who will intone a poem over Anastasio’s solo piano, the piece depicts a transformation from isolation to finding community onshore, “connecting with others, you know, with community and with joy and celebration and happiness,” much like her own journey from a period of relative isolation to this first public concert since early 2023.
And in keeping with the theme of the evening program, “it ends in this overall gratitude for life itself and the connections we are able to experience.”
The Barrientos/Agarita concert is free with advance registration requested. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the hourlong program begins at 7:30 p.m.
