24 May Joan Magrané by Quatuor Diotima
The music of Joan Magrané is the fruit of a passionate and sensitive musician, a wise connoisseur of the history and techniques – of writing and performance practice – that have been produced over the centuries. At the same time he is a composer of our time, an antenna of its complexity, and an artist endowed with a vision projected towards the future. Unlike many of the composers of his generation who seem to place themselves in a position of rejection of the past so as to be able to affirm their own “modernity” with evident radicality, history echoes in the compositions of Joan Magrané; this is certainly the case in the three quartets. Without nostalgia or complacency, history becomes a trail that directs the possible paths of exploration of sound, of one’s own ghosts, and of the world in which we live. Everything vibrates in this vision of the world; if history is the unapparent wisdom that allows us to confidently follow every path into the unknown, the world and its events are the exciters of the strings that transform all of it into sound mass. They are the soundboards of a memory that renews itself as it vibrates and transforms things and their perception.
Joan Magrané’s predilection for transparent and ever-changing sounds is apparent in the masterful writing of the three quartets: their music is incorporeal and at the same time rooted in history and performance practice, the melodic lines, although inspired by singing, become breath, and their interweaving builds a sound organism of which the composer highlights the almost physiological inner sound.
The album was recorded in 3D format at the Zaragoza Auditorium, in close collaboration with the composer, using a multichannel microphone system built to record and recreate acoustic spaces in sound installations of 10 speakers. The physical edition of MADRIGAL includes a CD, a 24 pages booklet with liner notes by Stefano Gervasoni, and a code to download the HD version of the album (24bit and 96kHz) in stereo and 5.1 surround formats.
