Photo via Nathalie Joachim
Nathalie Joachim
Nathalie Joachim
For Present Music’s season finale, the Milwaukee ensemble’s New York-based conductor-artistic advisor, David Bloom, chose an artist with whom he’d worked in the past. Nathalie Joachim is a genre defiant flutist-composer-vocalist, classically trained and at home in today’s music.
Bloom’s association with her began in 2020, right before Covid lockdown. “She was a guest artist with Face the Music, a new music youth orchestra in New York,” he recalls. “We played music from her GRAMMY-nominated debut solo album, Fanm d'Ayiti, which was originally for string quartet with Nathalie as vocal and flute soloist. I arranged the string quartet music for orchestra for the concert, which was at National Sawdust, a space-age venue in Brooklyn.”
The centerpiece of Present Music’s concert will be Joachim’s performance of a song cycle from her second album, Ki Moun Ou Ye. “Rooted in the farm in Haiti that Nathalie's family have made their home for many generations, the cycle is a moving search for self within her history and her present-day experience,” Bloom says. “To that end, the title track poses powerful questions: ‘Who are you? / Whose names are these? / Where do these names come from? / Who once owned us?’ Singing in both Haitian Creole and English, her voice is just extraordinary—like a warm embrace.”
The concert’s other components fit well with Joachim’s composition. Present Music will also perform Marcos Balter’s We Carry Our Homes Within Us Which Enables Us To Fly, which “shares with Ki Moun Ou Ye a palpable sense of home,” Bloom says. inti figgis-vizueta’s piece Form the Fabric also shares a sense of heritage. “Her piece is inspired by the Inca Road, which not only connected Incan and Andean people, but also made a connective tissue between the physical and spiritual realms,” he continues. In 2024 Present Music premiered an original commission for Paul Wiancko. He will be on the program with a sextet called Thous%ths.
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“Present Music loves to share music that says something about what it means to be alive right now, and thankfully there are so many different ways to answer that question. Nathalie's piece speaks really beautifully to this, and it served as a basis for the program as a whole,” Bloom concludes.
7:30 p.m. Friday, June 5 at Milwaukee Art Museum. For tickets, visit https://www.presentmusic.org/
