★Ψ★ Alberto Posadas (Valladolid, 1967)
★Ψ★ Hlavním zájmem španělského skladatele Alberta Posady je zkoumání vztahu mezi hudbou, přírodou a matematikou. Zaměřuje se také na souvislost mezi hudbou a jinými formami umění. Portrétní CD Poetics of Gaze (label NEOS) komplexně dokumentuje vliv výtvarného umění na jeho skladby. Pravidelně je rezidenčním skladatelem v IRCAM, držel stipendia od Svobodného státu Bavorsko (Villa Concordia, Bamberg) a Wissenschaftskolleg v Berlíně. Španělské ministerstvo kultury mu udělilo National Music Prize. Jeho hudba se hraje na mnoha festivalech, včetně Donaueschinger Musiktage, Eclat (Stuttgart), Ars Musica (Brusel), Ultima (Oslo), Klang~spuren Schwaz (Tyrolsko), Ultraschall (Berlín), Musica Strasbourg a Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik. Klangforum Wien s dirigentem Nacho de Paz.
★Ψ★ Před dvěma lety provedl klavírní recitál. Nebo lépe řečeno, spáchali to jiní: ve svém novém klavírním cyklu Erinnerungsspuren, napsaném pro pianisty Floriana Hoelschera, Alberto Posadas promění známý tvůrčí proces zapamatování na hudební zážitek: naše paměť transformuje naši zkušenost tím, že nám umožňuje zapomenout na některé části a změnit jiné. V každé ze svých šesti skladeb sleduje Posadas stopu jednoho historického skladatele a vytváří si vlastní cestu historií klavírní hudby, od Françoise Couperina po Bernda Aloise Zimmermanna.
★Ψ★ I arrived in Mexico city and was whisked off to a concert at El Colegio Nacional. It was the spanish quartet of 4 saxophones Sigma Project playing the world premiere of Alberto Posadas’s new three piece cycle 'Poética del Laberinto’. This was wonderful opportunity to catch up, with the magnificently accurate, inventive and awe inspiring performance by the spaniards. I thought this sort of precision could come only from a quartet of strings. — Irvine Arditti (june, 2017)
⌈⌉ Poética del Laberinto, pour quatuor de saxophones.
Location: Spain
Album release: 2020
Record Label : Wergo
Duration: 55:11
Tracks:
I. Knossos 19:35
II. Klimmen en dalen 22:32
III. Senderos que se bifurcan 13:04
Sigma Project:
Ψ Andrés Gomis, saxophones soprano & baryton
Ψ Angel Soria, saxophones soprano, alto et ténor
Ψ Alberto Chaves, saxophones soprano & ténor
Ψ Josetxo Silguero, saxophones soprano & baryton
Review
Andrew Clements
Fri 13 Mar 2020 09.41 GMT ⌈ Score: ★★★★
★Ψ★ Posadas: Poética del Laberinto review — musical myriads lit up by mythology
The Labyrinth, Escher’s unending stairs and a Borges story inform Posada’s three works for saxophone quartet, and Sigma Project find a huge range of effects with subtlety and detail.
★Ψ★ A 55~minute cycle of pieces for saxophone quartet might not seem a particularly enticing prospect. But in a succession of works over the last 20 years, including the remarkable Liturgia Fractal for string quartet, Sombras, for soprano, clarinet and string quartet, and Erinnerungsspuren for piano, the Spanish composer Alberto Posadas has shown that his fondness for composing pieces in linked groups, which may be performed individually or as continuous sequence, has resulted in some of the most striking music written in Europe in recent times.
★Ψ★ Posadas has likened his way of composing to journeying through a labyrinth, and the three pieces from 2016 and 2017 that make up Poética del Laberinto (Poetics of the Labyrinth), for saxophone quartet, take examples of such structures from the the arts and the classical world as their starting points. The first piece, Knossos, reflects on the excavations of the famous Minoan palace on Crete, generally thought to be the source of the legend of the labyrinth built by Daedalus to contain the Minotaur; the title of the second, Klimmen en Dalen, is taken from Escher’s lithograph of a building with a never~ending staircase, while the third, Senderos que se Bifurcan, comes from Jorge Luis Borges’s story The Garden of Forking Paths.
★Ψ★ But there’s nothing tritely descriptive or pictorial about Posadas’s approach; the sources are starting points for purely musical arguments. Knossos introduces each member of the quartet in turn, building up microtonal textures strand by strand, and extracting a huge range of shimmering effects — trills, glissandi, multiphonics — from the reed instruments. Klimmen en Dalen is built out of tangles of rising and falling scales and arpeggios from which it seems impossible to escape, with the sound of the instruments constantly modified by an exotic variety of mutes, while in Senderos que se Bifurcan, two tenor and two baritone saxophones trace out a series of independent lines that occasionally merge, only to separate and go in different directions again. It’s music of immense subtlety and intricate detail, and the four instrumentalists of the Sigma Project realise its myriad effects with extraordinary faithfulness.
★Ψ★ https://www.theguardian.com/
About:
★Ψ★ The paths of our thoughts, fantasies, and dreams are often convoluted. Since ancient times, the labyrinth has been a symbol of life itself with its paths, crossroads, dead ends, and odysseys. Some such mazes, though full of nooks and crannies, have only one path, one goal, and one exit. Others offer various routes. Written in 2016/17 for saxophone quartet, “Poética del Laberinto” [Poetics of the Labyrinth] by the Spanish composer Alberto Posadas is a cycle about three particularly iconic labyrinths from ancient times to the present day. In contrast to his usual way of composing, these three pieces are also framed by freely determined paths of reminiscence and a successive evolution of the instrumental sound — from uniformity of four soprano saxophones through the diversity of four distinct registers to the dominance of the bass register at the end. Sigma Project or, in other words, the combined talents of Andrés Gomis, Ángel Soria, Alberto Chaves, and Josetxo Silguero, is more than a saxophone quartet. It is a crucial conduit for the instrumental music of the 21st century. The group’s joint research and experimentation with Alberto Posadas resulted in a new understanding of the saxophone’s possibilities. In search of the sounds Posadas imagined, the players devised groundbreaking techniques to bring the composer’s ideas to life — sounds that a saxophone had never made before. “I arrived in Mexico City and was whisked off to a concert at El Colegio Nacional, where SIGMA Project, the Spanish saxophone quartet, was playing the world premiere of Alberto Posadas’s new three~piece cycle ‘Poética del Laberinto’. This was a wonderful opportunity to catch up with the magnificently accurate, inventive, and aweinspiring playing of the Spaniards. I thought this sort of precision could only come from a string quartet.” (Irvine Arditti, June 2017) The cycle “Poética del Laberinto” constitutes a thrilling compositional and performing adventure.