Alberto Posadas, a composer of sophisticated sound resonances | Culture

Alberto Posadas (Valladolid, 1967) is the resident composer of the current season of contemporary music of the National Musical Diffusion Center (CNDM). The residence contains the presence of inns in six concerts in the 400 auditorium of the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and three others in Alicante, Badajoz and Segovia. It also contemplates three orders with their corresponding absolute premieres and three more premieres in Spain. Of these six works in Primicia, five have gathered at this Monday’s concert in the 400 auditorium, so it was a special occasion to approach the work of this Valladolid creator who has climbed important positions in the international scene, but of which our country began to be substantially ignored part of its production, in a special way the most recent.

And the concert presented elements of remarkable interest in addition to what has been said. Four works of the listened to the Viola as the protagonist of exception. Posadas has a cycle of seven works with the viola as the protagonist and the nude as a special guest. The four presented yesterday are already made and the remaining three are pending composition.

In this interesting cycle, Posadas has emphasized one of the last topics that occupy him: the relationship with the plastic arts and, in this specific case, with the nude. Thus, the first of the pieces heard of the cycle (not the concert), is titled just The origin of the worldand places the metaphors game that emerge from the celebrated Coupler of Courbet and his female sex on the first plane. The next piece of the listened cycle was The young violinist reflected in mirrorFrom a photograph of Saul Leiter in which a naked young woman is blurred in something that could be a photographic target or a lens, this piece is for a duo of violas and was one of the world premieres. The next of the cycle, again for viola alone, is Pagyrosaccording to the famous statue of Police. And the cycle concluded with the no less famous Naked down a ladderof Duchamp, read for violas duo, also premiere.

It is very possible that this description does not clarify anything about the musical substance who has not heard them, because what interests Posadas is a sophisticated game of sound resonances that seem to investigate the depths of the secrets of the viola, that instrument once belittled, but that has a splendorous youth in the current generations; That instrument that, such as Doryphóros’s sculpture or any of the other nudes chosen by Posadas, seem to hide many more secrets than they show. It is an exciting trip undertaken by Posadas in this translation between the body and the sound enigmas of an instrument to which Posadas attributes a great closeness with “human identity.”

Naturally, this precise instrumentalist challenge as virtuous as close to the composer’s intentions, and they are Geneviève Strosser and Dimitrios Polisoidis, two violists who have made the sound universe of Posadas masterfully and have issued a lesson of clarity in the search for diffuse and complex sounds; A luxury for the composer and for the public.

But the concert contained two more works, both for double bass and soprano, a combination that allowed to provide sound results as attractive as risky. So that there were no dangers, two high -voltage soloists have been counted, the counterbag Dario Calderona and the soprano Johanna Vargas, prodigious in their benefits in two works, these yes, of different authorship, but joined by an umbilical cord as suggested as discreet. The oldest, Lotophagosof 2006, he had the signature of the great Swiss composer/Austrian Beat Furrer, one of the big names of the current panorama for decades, and a friend of Spain, in addition, that he took a poem by José Ángel Valente for this first work that does not disappoint even an apex to his admirers among which I am. And, on this work inserted in the almost monograph Uninhabited wordsof 2016. Two works, in any case, clearly prior to the Cycle for Viola, whose four pieces written and heard have composition dates between 2021 and 2024.

A concert, in short, of enormous coherence and original compositional conception that confirms that the best inns can be cooking in front of us.