Mauricio Sotelo

Album review

Following on Quatuor Diotima’s first excursion into Spanish territory (their 2017 recording of music by Alberto Posadas) this new single-composer addition to its discography shows what remarkable diversity may exist among contemporary composers of the same nationality and generation.
Mauricio Sotelo (born 1961) is a highly prolific composer and active participant in the current European scene, whose four string quartets to date, composed between 2002 and 2017, exemplify in many different ways how both flamenco and the music of Luigi Nono – Sotelo’s spiritual master since the 1980s – have consciously influenced his entire oeuvre.


Without any trace of folklorism, and with no sense of restrictive constraint, this Madrid composer has nonetheless rooted himself in the dance music of Andalusia, feeding on the heady rhythms of the bulería in Quartets No. 3 and No. 4 – in the latter work he also probes into Beethoven’s Op. 131 Quartet. Sotelo embodies the cante jondo in a slow-moving ritual (Quartet No. 2), deploys subtle percussive effects (in Quartet No. 1 and Quartet No. 2) and adapts traditional thematic and rhythmic material (see Quartet No. 1, which additionally references Luigi Nono and the philosopher poet Giordano Bruno).
These quartets continually reflect the alter flamenco or "spectral flamenco" which is Sotelo’s hallmark. He defines himself as a "contemporary composer using the voice of the cantaor flamenco", and with their fiery interpretations the string players of the Quatuor Diotima certainly set his music aflame. © naive classique