Yana Mann. Photo by Ira Pilipchenko.
Dubai based, Russian mezzo and producer Yana Mann, presents today her new video, “Blanca–Después,” the last poem from song cycle Op. 12, “Los Poemas de Bar,” composed by minimalist Julián De La Chica. The video was directed by Ira Pilipchenko. Edition and photography by Viktor Pilipchenko.
- Buy and stream Poemas de bar.
In May 2021, Yana Mann surprised the world with her album, Los poemas de bar, Op. 12. A neo-classic album with a minimalist aesthetic, performed by a singer whose classical background could make one think that the album belongs to the classical world of which we often understand little. However, the album is the complete opposite. Poemas de Bar narrates the most common stories in the daily life of our society: Love, loneliness, frustrations, deceit, and even suicide.
Julián De La Chica, a Brooklyn-based Colombian composer, pianist and producer (also author and filmmaker) whose name has grown in recent years on the New York scene, wrote the cycle during the long nights he spent in the city’s bars. According to De La Chica, there were two important bars in this context: a bar in the West Village and another bar in Brooklyn. “I titled them as poems because although they were the most common phrases in people’s lives, they contained immense worlds full of innumerable interpretations. Many times, in the midst of the noise, I could not know exactly what the story was about. However, with the little I heard, you could already imagine in your head what the matter was about. A bar, in the end, seems like a place for therapy. You are there, with someone close, or maybe not, recounting your whole life…”
Yana fell in love with the project in the middle of the pandemic. The fact that people were forced to be locked up served as a stage for her to resume new projects that she had in mind, some of them the recording of her first album and her exploration of the contemporary classical music scene. Both artists began intense work via zoom while the world outside remained silent. By the end of 2020, Yana announced the news: The release of her first studio album, produced and published under the Brooklyn label Irreverence Group music, premiering De La Chica’s full cycle.
Since then, the album has had a great reception from both audience and critics. Thomas May said: “For Mann, the achievement is a remarkable solo debut album that demonstrates not only the natural beauty of her voice but the sustained emotional directness with which she deploys it. Mann accentuates the faintest glimmer of hope in these songs detailing loss and absence with such gentle force that the cycle comes to generate a distinctly up-to-date melancholia.” George Grella also mentioned: “The result is a human connection, familiar shapes but new sounds. And with the bar stories coming through the voice, a feeling of duende that is something beyond genres and styles, just De La Chica’s own compositional voice. Tonight, that’s inseparable from the clarity and color of Yana Mann’s singing. She is both an excellent interpreter of the Poems, and the dedicatee of the Arias.”
Yana’s accuracy, her well-constructed technique, and her fresh approach to this music make her an artist out of the ordinary. Yana connects worlds, people and generations. Something not easy to find today in the classical music scene.
Mann moved to Dubai in 2012, and since then, she has been a pioneer in the city’s music scene. “It has not been easy,” she said. The patriarchal culture, which dominates the political and social sphere, leaves women relegated. Yana has constantly struggled with this, and for this, Blanca represents her “Statement.” Blanca talks about feminine power. She fills the space with light. She is prudent, and she knows how to wait, but she is powerful. She rules the world.
Watch the video HERE.
Connect with Yana Mann
Website: Yanamann.com
IG: @yanamann__/
FB: @yanamann
