Lluvia

Bienvenido.  WELCOME.

We begin our concert with folk and popular song in one of the world’s oldest living languages, Basque.   All of these are Romantic songs on A Love That Can Never Be, their evocative sighs amplified by the lisping sibilants of the Souletin dialect and the loping leaps that echo the Pyrenees where the music was born.  All together now:  ¡Ay!

Then, we have Lorca, who turns matters of the heart into things we can taste, touch, see, smell:  love, loss, panic, fear.  A revolutionary spirit executed at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca courted death in his art to summon the duende (Andalusian for ‘artistic inspiration’), which he associated with irrational desire, demonic enthusiasm and a fascination with la muerte.

Death
is coming in and leaving
the tavern,
death,
leaving and coming in.

Hearing Lorca’s words given musical form, we feel.  Mounting dread with each galloping ostinato, carrying the Rider towards Death; terror with every soprano glissando-siren-scream in Rautavaara’s Suite.  Futility as the winds of change blow around us in Russo’s Veleta (Vane) – chained in place by the past, the temperamental tonality, metre and tempo spin us every which way.  And when we can no longer think straight, our Soul-chests burst open, releasing Emotion.  A slow drizzle of notes falling softly to the ground-pitch in Margutti’s setting of Lorca’s Lluvia (Rain) gives us peace.

Water, sister rain
Rain that kisses the earth.

Grau’s Hermana Lluvia asks for life-giving rain, to save the 6000 children that die every day from dehydration.  Using native Indian rain chants, the rhythms and harmonies of salsa, Grau creates a music that is exuberant, exhilarating and inimitably Latin-American.  The musical tension is heightened by an ecstatic struggle to juggle all those incantations with eurhythmic movements that use salient features of both Indian prayer and salsa (the dance).  To think someone thought we could do it all (at the same time) – we are re-inspired by this wonderful piece of work written for our 40th birthday.

Before salsa, there was Cuban son, a dance music whose roots lie in - ¿qué? – 18th century English country dance.  Add 1.5 centuries of migration (via French Haiti), a healthy dose of African rhythmic complexity and many measures of bongos, timbales and cowbell (.gon.din.degobón-gon.din.dinbin), filter down to a salon-ful of musicians and the son is served.  Lorca was so inspired by son that he wrote a poem in son form, which Valera sets as Iré a Santiago.  Son borrows the call-and-response pattern from rumba guaguancó (which Quisiera is, hence the similarity between the two Valera numbers), a sexually suggestive dance that partners the polyphonic drumbeats of Nigeria with Spanish harmonics and melodies.  ¡Ay!

We close the concert with dance music born in the brothels of Argentina, the tango.  Piazzolla reworked the form into tango Nuevo, adding jazz harmonies, dissonances and counterpoint; insulting tango and classical musicians alike by erasing the borders between “serious” and entertainment music.  The tangos we perform tonight – arranged brilliantly by Zentner – come from Piazzolla’s Series del Ángel, which tell of a mysterious “angel” come to cleanse the souls of Buenos Aires flat-dwellers.  La Muerte del Ángel (Death of the Angel) begins with a 3-part tango-fugue, a chase followed by a desperate struggle between the villain and the “angel”, whom he kills.

Perhaps the Hispanic absorption with death – duende aside – gives them permission to savour life.  Perhaps we could dance a while in their shoes.  And live fully, love deeply.

Enjoy, you must.