Noelia Rodiles, Lucas Macías, & Oviedo Filarmonía: Mysterium
Eudora

In addition to delivering sterling performances on Mysterium, pianist Noelia Rodiles, the Oviedo Filarmonía, and conductor Lucas Macías deserve credit for two things in particular: giving attention to a work by Julián Orbón (1925–91) that has unjustly suffered from neglect; and presenting the first recording of an exciting new concerto by Manuel Martínez Burgos (b.1970). Each work is an inspired choice and welcome for being unfamiliar, and the recording's impact is enhanced by its just-right forty-eight-minute duration. Adding to the album's appeal is the contrast between the long-form structure of Orbón's Partite No. 4, Symphonic Movement for Piano and Orchestra and the five-part design of Burgos's “Cloches” piano concerto.

Composed in 1985 and premiered two years later, Orbón's Partite No. 4 is considered one of the most important works for piano and orchestra in the Spanish repertoire. After its well-received debut, the work was performed in Germany, Holland, Venezuela, and the United Kingdom, such attention seemingly promising a long life for the piece. Yet after the death in 1995 of Mexican conductor Eduardo Matta, who had premiered and championed the work, the Partite fell into neglect, only to be rescued from oblivion when thirty-two years later Rodiles happened upon the score in the Indiana University Bloomington library and then gave its first performance in Mexico in May 2019.

Born in Avilés, Spain, Orbón received his musical education in Spain, Cuba, and the United States, where he studied with Aaron Copland. After teaching in Mexico from 1960 to 1963, he moved to New York City and taught composition at Columbia University. Orbón wasn't prolific—his catalogue amounts to approximately thirty works—but one of his works is well-known to many (though they may not know the name of the person who wrote it) as the composer of the song “Guantanamera.” In writing Partite No. 4, Orbón drew for inspiration from Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria's motet O magnum mysterium, and in fact allusions to it appear throughout the Partite. Consistent with the character of the earlier work, Orbón's exudes an air of mysticism, though it's also, as Rodiles clarifies, a song of yearning for the Spain from which he'd been separated by war and exile.

That tone is instated when muted horns introduce the work with Victoria's chorale, but the music abruptly transforms from its eloquent, requiem-like beginning with a jolt of energy. The moment passes quickly, however, when the music returns to a brooding, grief-stricken state. Such fluctuations between solemnity and exuberance recur throughout, the work regularly alternating between aggressive and peaceful. Moments of urgency and agitation give the music thrust and propulsion; those of a quieter and more mournful disposition lend it a poetic, contemplative quality. An occasional episode invites comparison to Bartók's third piano concerto, especially when the Spanish composer's material segues between turbulence and introspection. Orbón weaves a delicate tapestry that Rodiles and her partners execute masterfully and with the greatest sensitivity to the work's shifting moods, tempi, and dynamics.

Burgos, who earned his PhD in Music at the University of Oxford, is the most awarded Spanish composer of his generation and currently a full professor of composition at the Higher Conservatory of the Principality of Asturias. His works have been praised as “universes of sound, full of expressive power and imagination,” words that certainly apply to his 2023 “Cloches” (“Bells”) piano concerto. It's a fascinating creation for a number of reasons but first and foremost is its association with bells that have become indelible parts of the “soundscapes” of cities and towns. In Burgos's words, his piano concerto “explores the expressive possibilities of bells as carriers of messages over long distances,” and through spectral analysis of different bells throughout Europe (including those at Paris's Notre Dame), he aspires to enact “a spiritual and magical dialogue between the piano and the orchestra.”

It begins with an elaborate nine-minute opening movement, “La vallée des cloches,” that towers over the four others, three of them but three minutes apiece. Piano chords inaugurate the work with bell-like accents that, ornamented by percussion flourishes, blossom thereafter into a dense orchestral mass, Rodiles' bright piano gliding confidently above the crystalline textures swirling below. The dramatic, tension-building “La cloche ‘Wamba'” shifts between episodes of meditative stillness and shattering intensity before segueing without pause into the insistent, bell-toned “Grand volée de cloches à Notre-Dame de Paris.” The spotlight's on the pianist when Rodiles sparkles unaccompanied through much of the “Cadenza” movement, after which the work exits in a blaze with the hyper-charged “Finale.”

While the album does feature the first recording of the Burgos work, Mysterium isn't the first album by Rodiles, who's given performances in many of Spain's principal concert halls but also in Bolivia, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Mexico, Poland, and Tunisia. Her first release featured material by Ligeti and Schubert, after which her Eudora debut, The Butterfly Effect, coupled works by Schumann, Schubert, and Mendelssohn with new commissions from Spanish composers Jesús Rueda, David del Puerto, and Joan Magrané. In 2023, she released 1823, which paired the world premiere recording of the First Piano Sonata by Martín Sánchez Allú with Schubert's Moments Musicaux. Two years on from it, this latest release will do nothing but enhance the stellar reputation she's established to date, and her accompanists, Oviedo Filarmonía and Lucas Macías, acquit themselves splendidly too.

January 2025