Santiago Cañón-Valencia: Ascenso
Sono Luminus

Santiago Cañón-Valencia's latest release arrives with a somewhat curious statement by the artist: “My idea is that this is not a cellist's recording, or an album centred around the instrument, but rather a work that is meant to be experienced as you would a painting on a wall, whatever that may mean to you.” It's difficult, however, to broach Ascenso as anything but a recording oriented around the cello when it's the sole instrument featured; perhaps what's he's stressing is that the recording shouldn't be regarded as a collection of virtuosic displays—which it nevertheless is—and instead as a integrated compositional statement, the focus therefore shifting more to the material than performer.

However one approaches it, Ascenso impresses for the exceptional level of musicianship on display, the cohesiveness of the album statement, and the smartly determined running time, the forty-two-minute length a thoroughly satisfying total for a solo recording. Also recommending it is the fact that four of its five pieces are world premiere recordings, with the fifth a transcription of Isaac Albéniz's Asturias (Leyenda) by the award-winning cellist, born in Bogota in 1995. Ascenso follows his debut release on the Atoll label, Solo (challenging twentieth-century works recorded when he was only sixteen), an album of Russian cello sonatas (Shostakovich, Schnittke, Prokofiev), and Diable Vert, a collection of popular pieces (Schumann, Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov, etc.), the latter two releases performed with pianist Katherine Austin and also issued on Atoll. If the fact that he recorded Solo as a teen seems impressive, consider that he made his orchestral debut as a soloist with the Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá at the age of six.

Each of the five settings has a story to tell, beginning with La Ruta de la Mariposa (The Butterfly Route) by Damián Ponce de León. A serendipitous convergence of butterfly-related incidents led to its creation: a conversation he had with Colombian dancer Federico Restrepo about the creature's flight patterns, the killing of a Mexican environmentalist who devoted his life to protecting Monarch butterflies, and the composer discovering a benign cyst in his thyroid gland that curiously had the shape of a butterfly. Extrapolating from such experiences, Ponce de León designed an episodic piece whose cyclical movements evoke the graceful flight path of a butterfly. Following an intro of hushed harmonics, the piece blossoms into a stately series of double-stopped phrases and, subsequently, an animated episode whose patterns most directly reflect the cyclical concept and a meditative sequence that reprises the introductory material. As understated as it is, the plucked section that arrives towards the end might be the work's most entrancing part.

Commissioned by the cellist, Jorge Humberto Pinzón Malagón's “fantasy for solo cello” Mesonoxian (of or relating to midnight) plunges immediately into an elegiac zone before, like the opening piece, redirecting its energies into an ethereal space where lyrical bowings and delicate strums alternate. As peaceful as much of it is, Mesonoxian ultimately climaxes in an outpouring of passion. Originally composed for piano as the prelude to a three-piece set called Chants d'Espagne (Songs of Spain), Albéniz's Asturias (Leyenda) advances from a flamenco-styled opening punctuated by aggressive stabs into a gripping introspective sequence before returning to the driving style for a hypnotic coda. Leonardo Federico Hoyos drew for inspiration for Urban Rhapsody from the cellist's birthplace and fashioned the piece as “a story of a day in Bogotá.” A mini-portrait of the locale is evoked in the energy of the playing, the florid quality of the writing, and the driving rhythms that give the material thrust. The release concludes with Ascenso Hacia lo Profundo (Ascent towards the depths), a piece composed by the cellist himself that succeeds in amplifying the instrument's capacity for generating atmospheric texture and its ability to establish an engulfing, soundscape-like environment.

February 2023