Yana Mann releases new single and video "Ella"
Sadness and pain. Love and separation. Loss and hope. These are some of the themes running deeply throughout Dubai-based mezzo-soprano, Yana Mann’s debut studio album. A collaboration with Brooklyn-based Colombian composer Julián De La Chica, who describes Yana as having, ‘A very intriguing voice. There is a palpable darkness to her that gives the songs that peculiar atmosphere necessary to tell a story’.
“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.”
— Thomas May
Yana Mann
Photo by Vladimir Osnovin
“What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness”: when considered from a post-2020 perspective, Rainer Maria Rilke’s words of advice to an aspiring young poet can sound like cruel mockery. In this era of sudden lock-downs and quarantine restrictions, enforced isolation has become the prosaic default whose recurrence we dread. But to cultivate “the expanse of your own solitude,” as Rilke counsels, can set the stage for creative liberation—to the breakthrough that otherwise lies beyond reach, jealously guarded by the fear of rejection.
In September 2020, in the midst of the corona pandemic, the Russian mezzo-soprano Yana Mann decided to take a major career leap by releasing her first studio album, this world premiere recording of the Poemas de Bar cycle by the Brooklyn-based composer Julián De La Chica. Also a professional producer and obsessed with detail in her interpretive art, Mann is devoted to working with contemporary composers and had been searching for a connection with one whom she could trust in such an important undertaking.