On December 15, the Auditori de Barcelona played host to two world premieres of clearly literary inspiration, both commissioned by Barcelona's Creació Sonora: Ariel (2022) by Montserrat Lladó and Restos de Puente (2022) by José Mora. The evening's repertoire closed with Machaut-Architekturen (2003-2005) by renowned Spanish composer José María Sánchez-Verdú, and the new version for six percussionists of Dust III (2018-2021), by British composer Rebecca Saunders, one of the most outstanding composers of her generation.

As soon as you enter theAuditori's Sala 2 Oriol Martorell, a few minutes before the concert, you are struck by the docile arrangement of the instruments, barely illuminated by the chiaroscuro of the stage. Faced with the respectful murmurs of the audience, already intrigued by the suspended melodic images, the instruments resemble sleeping animals ready to be brought to life at any moment. And the equation is simple: brass and strings, woodwinds and percussion. So when the lights go down, the spell is lifted.

In fragile equilibrium with silence, like particles scattered in space, the fragmented notes gradually gather around us, magnetized in the void by the aesthetic gravitation that resides in José Mora's work. Indeed, the world premiere of Restos de Puente, a work composed of thirty-five chapters/verses plus a final epilogue, unfolded like a winding journey through a ruined landscape, barely delineated, with vague, imprecise contours. This discourse is presented as a metaphor for precarious survival, irrevocably subject to the passage of time, deterioration and ruin. This is reflected not only in the title of José Mora's work, but also in the texts placed on the musicians' scores, with the following lines: "The remains of the bridge betray the failure of communication. Pieces whose existence implies loss. Fragments that can only be explained by someone else's past". A whole imaginary world of loss, subtly evoked by musicians who have captured this sobriety full of hollows and roughness, tracing a discourse that concedes nothing to traditional rhetoric, far from a classical conception of beauty; an aesthetic, in short, that flees the limits of pulsation, tempo and rhythm. José Mora's work was impalpable, like sand slipping through the fingers, but enchanting in its hypnotic exploration of detachment.   

The evening continued with Machaut-Architekturen (2003-2005) by Sánchez-Verdú, and we left the sandy landscape offered by Mora to enter a landscape of great structural solidity, for Sánchez-Verdú's piece is a solidly drawn piece, which gives the timbre a special significance. While Machaut-Architekturen (2003-2005) consists of five pieces (or movements), Crossing Lines and Sánchez-Verdú have chosen pieces III, IV and V for this concert. Although these pieces were originally conceived as interludes between the five parts of the Messe de Nostre Dame by Canon Guillem Machaut - one of the masterpieces of medieval music, the first complete mass preserved before 1365 - the selection was sufficient for the audience to appreciate Sanchéz-Verdú's temperament and musical sense, his discreet approach to the use of metre, and his metrical precision. All this unfolded in an articulated, layered framework, a polyphonic discourse rich in nuances and textures between tradition and modernity. In fact, with this sincere expressive desire to communicate with tradition, the Spanish composer not only takes root in it, but expands, nourishes and enriches it.

Rebecca Saunders and Montserrat Lladó opened the second half of the concert.
Although the two composers are from different generations, they both draw inspiration from literature to nourish their artistic sensibilities; with an almost innate predisposition to weave dark atmospheres with microscopic, fragile timbral contours.

The first work, Dust III (2008-2021), stems from Dust (2018), a solo piece by Saunders that crowned a process of nearly fifteen years of sound research.

However, as if this constant exploration were the British composer's artistic raison d'être, for this concert Rebecca Saunders offered us Dust III, a new version of the original, but adapted for six percussionists, from the Frames Percussion ensemble, spread across different spaces. The piece breathes through eight independent but combinable modules, illustrating a narrative attentive to microtonality and, in turn, to low frequencies; interested in the discovery of original sounds, new tessituras, proceeding by combining elements or using unconventional objects; or again, by the creation of unheard-of sonic artifacts. All these sonorities unfolding before us may well remind us of the tessitura of mud, that mixture of water and earth, allowing us to understand through the senses that the fragmented - in this case Dust - always refers to a greater unity.   

If Dust III is inspired by the work of Samuel Beckett, Monsterrat Lladó 's Ariel (2022) has its roots in Sylvia Plath's poem of the same name. The young Spanish composer's work gave the final part of the concert an air of timbral procession, with the Cosmos Quartet string quartet and the timpani quartet sounding precise and subtle, both wrapped in a synthesizer-like electronic membrane, passing through amplifications of sound and dilations of time that lend Lladó's work a certain quality of liturgical and initiatory ritual.  

Txema Seglers

Photo article Montserrat Lladó © Natalia Franco
Photo © Elvira Megías/CNDM
Photo © Miquel Angel