World Premiere by Matthew Aucoin at Chicago Symphony Orchestra Gives Voice to the “Disappeared” in Pinochet’s Chile

In Monday’s (12/1) Chicago Sun-Times, Graham Meyer writes, “About a year ago, the composer Matthew Aucoin was working on a commission for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra…. He looked at the election results and felt the country was pointed in a ‘scary’ direction. Having already just a few sketches in place for the piece, he found the poetry of the Chilean dissident Raúl Zurita…. Zurita’s text brought the piece its voice. Even though Zurita wrote the text in 2003, referring back to his detention in the 1970s …  in Chile, Aucoin found resonance between Zurita’s experience and [today’s] U.S. government … The finished piece, ‘Song for the Reappeared,’ has its world premiere with the CSO from Dec. 4 to 7. Zurita was arrested on the morning of the 1973 coup that brought the dictator Augusto Pinochet to power…. Zurita survived and was released, but many others detained under the Pinochet regime were killed, and their deaths for many years officially unacknowledged…. The piece was composed as a sort of concerto for voice for soprano Julia Bullock … Aucoin also had in mind the particular sound of the CSO, an ensemble he knows well from serving as the Solti Conducting Apprentice with the orchestra from 2013 to 2015.”