Liturgia fractal – Aborescencias

Music is not there to please people it is there to disturb them. Pierre BoulezAlberto Posadas is a Spanish composer, born in Valladolid in 1967. He was a student of Francisco Guerrero, not the famous sixteenth century Maestro de Capilla of Seville Cathedral, but his modern namesake, who died at the early age of forty-six in 1997. Guerrero inspired Posadas to research new techniques such as fractal geometry with which to shape musical forms to match natural phenomena. Posadas has worked to integrate aesthetics into these mathematical yet natural processes and this has led him to such ideas as translating architectural space into music (reminding us of Xenakis) and the exploration of the acoustic features of instruments at the microscopic level. Liturgia fractal is a cycle of five string quartets, Aborescencias is the fourth quartet in the cycle and is the only one in the cycle that can be performed as a single independent work. The cycle was written for Quatuor Diotima. The composer describes this piece as an exception within the cycle: strictly speaking it is not – in and of itself – a true string quartet. It is rather a concert piece for solo violin and string trio. Thanks to this exceptional situation, it is the only piece of the cycle that can be performed without the others, because it functions on its own.The violinist Yun-Peng Zhao has described the experience of being the soloist in this extraordinary music: It is as if one were playing a miniature concerto. I have the feeling that Alberto paid great attention to every chord, every overtone figure, because he even wrote a few fingerings into the score.That meant that one has merely to follow these indications in order to arrive at a convincing result.That ‘merely’ is a small indication of the prodigious technique of the Diotimas who can handle to the manner born the unique demands of this music, music not to everyone’s taste but the sheer virtuosity is a spectacle in itself. The piece opens mysteriously, almost lyrically, at the limits of inaudibility growing towards the first of two cadenzas for the soloist, which the trio then picks up. The title Arborescencias gives some clue as the natural forces at work here, the power and the crushing of earth and rock that is required for arboreal growth. The second cadenza is approached softly and the trio weaves itself into the soloist’s part. Throughout the work enormous fields of energy are generated as though this indeed is the stuff of life. The close is quiet, the piece lasts barely twelve mind-bending minutes.