DESCRIPTION:
Arietha Lockhart - soprano
Mary Au - piano
Chen Yi - composer

3/10/10 performance on Faces of Eve recital presented by Women's Works Concert Series in NYC

Bright Moonlight was commissioned in 2000 by the New York Festival of Song, for its Songbook for a New Century project, supported by Meet the Composer and the ASCAP Foundation. The structure of the poem, which I wrote in English, is borrowed from a fixed form of Chinese ancient poems called "Picking Mulberry with Added Characters." It is simple, straight but abstract -- from outside to inside, from describing landscape to expressing thinking, from close by to distance, from the past to the future. It's about contemporary human beings and our yearning. I think that it's timeless.
Bright Moonlight was premiered by Theodora Hanslowe, mezzo-soprano, and Michael Barrett, piano, at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College, NYC, on March 22, 2001.

Outside my window bright moonlight,
Kissing the grassland;
Near in front, far away,
Given to the earth with consonance,
Look at the window bright moonlight,
Missing my homeland.
Near in front, far away,
Yearning for the world of consonance.