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The Granada Festival’s resident composer is Mauricio Sotelo, an essential musician of our avant-garde. He is a benchmark in composition at an international level and owner of a catalog of works that is the best example of his quality as an author of music in which the language of oral tradition is integrated with the most elaborate avant-garde. The composer from Madrid (1961) has moved the roost with skill, has sought new paths and animated the panorama with always interesting initiatives.
His restlessness has been and is beneficial, and his union for years with the poet José Ángel Valente has promoted some scores of high emotional density.
His connection with the world of cante jondo has been fundamental. The same as his opening to the lyrical-dramatic vein that lately forms the backbone of his staves, distilled from a rich Viennese formation later passed through the refined sieve of Luigi Nono. Influences that he has been able to synthesize with intelligence and knowledge and above all personality.
Sotelo, in fact, is one of the most imaginative minds in our music and moves like a fish in water in that complex world of timbral suggestions and jondo motifs, creating with a burning lyricism sound images of high spirituality that project to very high strata the Valentian ideological conceptions. We remember in this respect works of obvious lyrical condensation such as Lecciones de tinieblas, which featured the art, so lamented today, of Enrique Morente, and El rayo de tiniebla, which included another fabled singer, Arcángel.
In Granada several of his latest creations can be heard, on different days and venues and by different interpreters: string quartets No. 3the memoire set on fire and No. 4, Quasals vB-131, Bulería for solo viola, Dawn enters the Alhambra… Although the most interesting, of course, is the world premiere of old songs of flamenco for viola soloist and orchestra, which has to celebrate the centenary of the Cante Jondo Congress as it deserves and which is the title of a famous Morente album. Sotelo tells us about it: “One of the things I talked about a lot with him and with Valente was the idea of interiority. Not singing out loud, but singing inwards, towards the deepest interiority. That abyss inward”.
It will be the distinguished violist Tabea Zimmermann who will take the lead in the new score, in which she will collaborate, along with the City of Granada Orchestra and its Young Academy, its head Lucas Macías. And she will also be the one to take part in the leading role in the symphonic poem Don Quixote op. 35 by Richard Strauss, a monumental work, which runs through some of the most notable episodes of Cervantes’ work. The knight-errant is represented by the voice of the cello, played by the Canadian Jean Guihen-Queras. It will be on the night of June 29.
As an ‘appetizer’ it will be played The Albaicin of the Iberia Suite of Albeniz in the original and colorful orchestration by Francisco Guerrero, who turns the piano score upside down and gives it an aggressiveness very typical of the composer from Linares.