Spanish National Orchestra conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya
I - Andante - Moderato - Allegro: 0:00
Antón García Abril (born in 1933) is one of the most prolific spanish composers up to date. His orchestral work aims to continue the Spanish nationalist tradition with the avant-garde advances of the moment. Nevertheless, in recent years García Abril's music seems to tend more towards nationalism than at the avantgarde. He is considered a scholar and admirer of the melody, which he usually adorns with frequent changes of rhythm and a generally explosive orchestration.
Hemeroscopium was commissioned by the Spanish Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, which premiered on April 22, 1972, under the direction of Enrique García Asensio, to whom the work is dedicated. When García Abril, in 1969, began to conceive the work, he came from studying a music that nobody would associate with him: the second viennese school, a music in which García Abril felt so interested that he wrote some pieces under the influence of serialism, causing a great scandal in the musical scene of Madrid, like much new music that was being composed at the time.
Hemeroscope (Greel term; in Latin, Dianio) was a Greek settlement in an area that we could place today between Júcar and Cartagena; more or less the current Denia (Alicante). It means something like an observatory of sunlight, surely to control the migrations of tunas. So it is no accident that when we hear it, we perceive the Mediterranean in all its facets, including the marine painting itself. We see, perhaps, some influence of Ravel, but above all what is clear is that Garcia April 1972 does not place himself on the same side as the "modern". Actually, and as Antonio Gallego once pointed out, there is a «bravery in facing a kind of aesthetic dictatorship that had ended up being almost "official" throughout Europe, and also here in the last years of the Francoist dictatorship».
Picture: Wallpaper based on the "Ladies in Blue" fresco from the Palace of Knossos, Greece.
Source from the program notes of the concert.
9 окт 2024
