by Daniel Hathaway

Parallel revolutions in France and Haiti have inspired the second episode of this season’s online concert series from Les Délices. “Winds of Change,” which went live on November 18 and is available both on subscription and as a single performance, includes late 18th-century music by Joseph Bologne (Chevalier de Saint-Georges), Karl Bochsa, and Luigi Boccherini, and the premiere of a commissioned piece, Haitian-born composer Sydney Guillaume’s A Journey to Freedom.

Following centuries of injustice and exploitation, new ideas of equal opportunity and representative government in one of the principal documents of the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, led enslaved Africans in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (which included what is now Haiti) to mount their own revolution in 1791, only two years after the French. Struggles for racial justice are ongoing. [Read more…]