Vocalise

Resenha do Álbum

If the soprano Nuria Rial and the composer Bernat Vivancos feel an affinity with the legendary violoncellist Pablo Casals, it is not just because all three hail from Catalonia. Casals, who was obliged to flee his native country following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, ended each of the concerts that he gave in exile by playing El Cant dels Ocells (The Song of the Birds). Bernat Vivancos has arranged it especially for Nuria Rial and the eight cellists of the Sinfonie orchester Basel. In 2013 a violoncello octet was formed from the violoncello section of the Sinfonieorchester Basel that plays not only tangos and cinema classics but also commissioned works written specially for this unusual formation. Bernat Vivancos has dedicated Vocal Ice to Nuria Rial and the Cello Octet of the Sinfonieorchester Basel. Piazzolla’s suite The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires dates from 1970 and is scored for strings, piano, electric guitar and bandoneon. As its name implies, it is a counterpart to Vivaldi’s famous violin concertos here relocated to the southern hemisphere or, to be more exact, to Buenos Aires. Borrowings from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons extend beyond the work’s title, for Piazzolla ends his Latin American Summer with a quotation from Vivaldi’s Winter. To date there have been countless arrangements of The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, including one for eight violoncellos prepared by the British composer and violoncellist James Barralet in 2013. Piazzolla himself often performed the work with his various bands, rewriting it to suit the changing live conditions. Arguably the best-known composition by Villa-Lobos is the fifth Bachianas Brasileiras, which is notable for its use of dissonant suspensions reminiscent of Bach. In the first movement, written 1938, the soprano begins by performing a wordless vocalise to the accompaniment of four doubled violoncello lines. The emotionally charged middle section is a setting of a poem by Ruth Valadares Corrêa. At the end her humming suggests a senseof yearning. The second movement, with its hammering dance rythm, was not added until 1945. © SM/Qobuz