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the schedule of Jose Maria Sanchez-Verdu (Algeciras, 1968) is incessant: recordings, interviews, conferences, classes, concerts… and in many cases, premieres of new works. There are hardly any days left without his music playing somewhere. In a very high count, two hundred long works accumulate in his catalog since his presentation as a composer at the very end of the eighties. All this produces a sensation of vertigo that contrasts with the apparent calm with which he himself shows what he does. Last Tuesday, at the Residencia de Estudiantes, he explained the keys that have shaped ‘Hacia la luz’, a commission from the National Orchestra and Choir of Spain presented this weekend, two years later than planned.
Alternating with the performance of the Trío Musicalis, Sánchez-Verdú, interviewed by Eve Sandovalspoke of the philosopher Parmenides of Elea, and of his poem in the Homeric dialect, more exactly of his proem, located at the origin of the composition.
The ideological framework is consubstantial to the work of Sánchez-Verdú. In a first approximation is the descriptive intention of the music with the translation of the screeching of the wheels of the carriage that, dragged by steeds and escorted by the Daughters of the Sun, takes the philosopher towards the Truth, stopping at the gates of day and night, whose sonorous friction precedes the encounter with the Goddess. At this level, Sánchez-Verdú’s imagination is already prodigious: the use of buzzers, the allusive sound of the kettledrum, the unknown activity of the bass saxophone, the underlying presence of the organ, the unusual use of the orchestra. Perhaps it is wrong to say that he invents new sonorities from more or less known musical objects; in reality, Sánchez-Verdú brings out what exists but remained unnoticed.
The presence of unpublished sound images is one of the singularities of Sánchez-Verdú’s music and one of the difficulties of its interpretation. For the season premiere of the National Orchestra and Choir of Spain, the director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, who has already premiered with ONE, and together with the clarinetist Joan-Enric Lluna, ‘In Praise of the Horizon’, at the unsuccessful Festival América España in 2007. The lack of sensationalism and the clarity with which he is able to present the music is his own hallmark that in the second part of the concert, dedicated to Mendelssohn, led to interpretations tinged with satisfaction. The innocuous score of ‘Calm Sea and Happy Journey’, with its heraldic ending, and the religious charm of ‘Psalm 42’ sounded pretty, in this case supporting the soprano Ruth Iniestaexample of professionalism and solvency.
Mendelssohn manages well in an environment of serenity, of controlled excesses and apparent drama, but in the case of Sánchez-Verdú a more committed reading should be considered, originating from that surface of original sonorities as a reflection of intrahistory. The composer notices it when speaking of the shamanic, the mystical and the magical.
‘Hacia la luz’ adheres to an ancestral voice that emerges from the disturbing low vibrato of Ryoko Aoki, coming from the Japanese Noh theater, from the mass of deep male voices and from the seven female voices (Daughters of the Sun) located on the upper right side of the National Auditorium. It is in the composer’s ability to put apparently dissimilar elements in relation and in the performer’s it should be to merge them with a penetrating perspective. But circumstances were imposed on the very disposition of the interpreters, forcing a higher order: there was a lack of density, compactness and detail in the emission of the deep voices (with members of the National Choir of Spain, of the Community of Madrid, RTVE and Coral de Chamber of Pamplona) placed in the stands at the back of the stage, with a mask and an exaggerated separation, in the same way that the orchestra may have bowed to a more subtle and undulating interference. The performance of the National Orchestra of Spain depends to a large extent on the scheduled conductor. This season he has offered his best version in some concerts with his headline, David Afkham, achieving extraordinary concerts. With Harth-Bedoya the result has been competent, orderly, well prepared, absent of artifice, without risk; too cautious in the face of the background pretext that gives meaning to ‘Hacia la luz’, the last known link in the wide universe of musical doctrines compiled in Sánchez-Verdú’s catalogue.