Joan Magrané Figuera
Writing against all odds

Interviews 16.07.2021

Polyphony as an essential and radical element

At just thirty-two years of age, Catalan composer Joan Magrané Figuera has some eighty works in his catalogue, covering practically every genre of musical creation, including opera. While drawing on the marvels of Renaissance polyphony, he seeks to establish, within a resolutely contemporary writing style, subtle linksbetween the models of his heritage and his own sound universe.

Dialegs de Tirant e Carmesina, like the other two stage works that precede it in your catalogue, was commissioned by Òpera de Butxaca y nova creació (Pocket Opera and New Creation). This production organisation is not well known in France. What exactly is it about?
It is a Barcelona-based company whose mission is to promote young creators and to develop the operatic world by commissioning young composers. Initially, it was a festival dedicated to small stage formats (pocket opera) and then it became a much more active production house, which went beyond the borders of Spain, promoting co-productions with Germany in particular. Today, Òpera de Butxaca y nova creació concentrates its activity in Catalonia and works in conjunction with the stages of Barcelona's major institutions, such as the Liceo.  

Let's go back to your first stage attempts with the two fragments, Death of Dido (IV) and Epilogue mentioned in your catalogue. What is the nature of the project?
Dido and Aeneas reloaded is a collective project, an 'experimental' work with four heads. Each of us had to compose a part of the opera, lasting approximately fifteen minutes. We wrote the libretto ourselves based on Purcell's work. Initially, the opera had four parts and then we added an epilogue. This was a trial run for me with very limited resources, two singers and two instruments (cello and bass clarinet), where I mix languages and play with references, Monteverdi, Purcell, Debussy, etc. Models that fascinate me in terms of the way they are performed. Models that fascinate me in terms of the relationship between words and music.

Also related to Òpera de Butxaca y nova creació, DisPLACE (a story of a house) is on a larger scale, with the presence of a librettist.
This time the project is being developed in tandem with the composer Raquel García Tomás, who was already involved in the 'Dido reloaded' adventure. But this time it is two very different works, each lasting thirty minutes, on the same subject (a foreign couple in a Barcelona flat), with the same librettist, Helena Tornero, and the same director, Peter Pawlik. It is a co-production of Òpera de Butxaca and the Vienna Musikttheatertage. Both singers and instrumentalists of the Phace ensemble are Viennese.

Listen here: DisPLACE (a story of a house)

This very intimate eight-clos looks towards the theatre and calls for singer-actors.
Indeed, chamber opera creates a closer relationship with the audience. In DisPLACE, the text is often spoken and the singing does not have to be deployed as it is on the big opera stages. The instrumentalists stand on the edge of the stage and are illuminated, in direct contact with the singers; I am keen on this presence of the instrumental gesture, even if the musicians remain outside the dramaturgy. 

Do you use amplification?
Normally not. It was not planned beforehand. However, it was necessary to use it to improve the acoustics of the venue.

Dialegs de Tirant e Carmesina is on a completely different scale!
This is actually my first real opera, lasting about an hour and a half. With the Catalan playwright Marc Rosich, we started from the novel Tirant le Blanc by Joanot Martorell (1413-1468), a figure from the Valencian Golden Age, and we chose the love story between the knight and Carmesina, the daughter of the emperor of Constantinople. I immediately thought of Monteverdi's Combattimento di Trancredi e Clorinda, a model that guided me in my aesthetic choices.

Notably for the instrumental device?
I wanted to suggest the presence of period instruments, so I called on a string quartet reminiscent of the viols of the Renaissance "consort", as well as the harp (as a theorbo) and the flute, which is always present in early music.

The libretto is in Catalan and your vocal style is very close to Monteverdi's recitar cantando (1)...
We have kept the old Catalan, which is even closer to Italian than the language of today. It was ideal for me to model the accents of the text on the Monteverdian chant. There are no quotations as such, but I sometimes use certain aria forms such as those found in Ulysses' Return to his Homeland. This way of invoking the ancients through the borrowing of structural models is something I stole from my teacher Stefano Gervasoni!

A few more words about the public's reception?
The opera was sold out at the Peralada festival for the premiere, in the open air, in the superb setting of a cloister. The show was repeated for three evenings in the small hall of the Liceo in Barcelona, with a capacity of three hundred people, where we had a full house. Clearly, the opera did very well!

How did you experience this second confinement? Did it have an impact on your work?
I experienced this second confinement with resignation, like everyone else, but above all with more uncertainty for the future, with a more asphyxiating feeling than last March insofar as the postponement of concerts is more uncertain, especially in the planned formats. However, I was lucky enough to have a lot of work and I was able to make the most of this sort of social "memento mori" that happened to us again.

Were the concerts and shows that were planned able to take place? Under what conditions and in what state of mind?
From the first days of the summer onwards, it seemed that everything was getting back on track and a few concerts were able to take place before everything came to an abrupt halt for a second time. For example, just a week before the new lockdown (and with rehearsals already underway) we had to suspend the creation of a complex eighteen-part piece that I wrote for Les Eléments over a year ago and which should hopefully be premiered in a few months. The premiere of my monodrama Dànae recorda for soprano and violin on a libretto by Helena Tornero, commissioned by the Liceu in Barcelona, had to be performed without an audience and only via streaming. I also had the creation of an orchestral piece for the Orquesta Nacional de España conducted by David Afkham with a string section reduced to a minimum. Among other things... On the other hand, the concerts that have been given in good conditions, I have experienced them with greater emotion and intensity than usual and I believe that this is a sensation shared in general by everyone, performers and audience. And that, despite everything, is still beautiful and powerful.

What projects are you working on today?
I am currently completing a major score for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Intérieur, (based on Maurice Maeterlinck's play of the same name) which will be directed by Silvia Costa and premiered on 22 and 23 October 2021 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.
I will soon be writing a piece, based on two poems by Goethe, for soprano, choir and orchestra for the upcoming season of the Barcelona Orchestra and its brand new choir, which will be performed at theAuditori de Barcelona as part of my residency for the coming season.

Do they define new issues in your composition?
By nature, my musical thinking tends towards the miniature and the detailed. Without modifying this state of mind, with the work I have undertaken recently, I have ventured a little further and I have enjoyed tackling wider and vast territories. With a different way of moving forward, of developing materials, more "Brucknerian" one might say...

"The last rose of summer" - December 2019 at Ars Santa Monica

Are you worried about the cultural future of the next few years? How would you sum up the situation in Catalonia with regard to cultural activity?
It's obvious that the future is going to be difficult, very difficult, for all of us, but I also hope that all this history will have done us some good in the long run. For example, by making us more aware of the inherent fragility (which is, on the other hand, a great wealth, I believe) of our dear world: music. In Catalonia, among the more or less good initiatives, we have seen the emergence of some very high quality online concert broadcasting projects (at the Auditori, at the Palau de la Música, with the Camera Musicae orchestra...), something that I believe can prove to be a very valuable tool at all levels, especially for the dissemination of our work and its valorisation among a wider public.

Interview by Michèle Tosi

Photo © Daniel Campbell

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