At the request of the Fundación Juan March, the Bretón Quartet will perform Conrado del Campo’s quartets No. 1 and 4 next Wednesday, 17 February. For the declamation of the text in Quartet No. 4, the poem A buen juez, mejor testigo by José Zorrilla, they will have the special collaboration of the actress Clara Sanchís. The Bretón Quartet is the Spanish quartet that has paid the most attention to Conrado del Campo in modern times, performing some of his quartets throughout the Spanish, French and German geography. Its commitment with the Spanish repertoire, and with Conrado del Campo in particular, has led some of the members of the Bretón Quartet to take care of the necessary transcriptions of the manuscripts so as to be able to perform them, in particular of quartets number 1 and 8. The work with No. 8 is a critical edition that resulted in an article written by cellist John Stokes and presented at the congress El Cuarteto de Cuerda en España de finales del s. XVIII a la actualidad, organized by the University of Granada.
This initiative involving the Bretón Quartet was developed by the Fundación March in collaboration with the CEDOA/SGAE, keeper of the Conrado del Campo fund, and the Spanish Society of Musicology. It entails, as above mentioned, the previous transcription and editing of the materials by a team of musicologists, and will result in the publication of all quartets composed by Conrado del Campo, thus remaining accessible to interpreters, since Conrado del Campo’s notation and, in some cases, the state of the materials, have often been a deterrent. This situation has led to one of the most important, if not the most important, legacy of a Spanish composer for string quartet being practically unknown not only to the general public but to the interpreters as well.
Upcoming engagements of the Breton Quartet include its participation as resident quartet in the Piano Competition “Premio Jaén”, in which they will accompany the semifinalists at the chamber repertoire; a concert in quintet together with the guitarist Miguel Trápaga at the Teatro Bulevar in Torrelodones; and a return to an important Spanish festival whose programme has not yet been announced. Its latest album is the one dedicated to Tomás Bretón’s Quartets No. 1 and 3, released by NAXOS last March.
Bretón String Quartet The Breton String Quartet was formed in 2003 when four musicians with extensive experience in various chamber music ensembles and sharing a passion for string quartets and Spanish composers, decided to go beyond the repertoire that is most...
Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo will perform within the Crumb-Lorca Project at the Granada International Music and Dance Festival on its 70th anniversary edition. This series of three monographic concerts is the core of the Crumb-Lorca Project, in which groups such as the Bretón Quartet, NeoArs Sonora or United Instruments of Lucilin dedicate part of their programs to the works of this North American composer. It is a historic event because the 12 works that George Crumb composed over more than half a century under the inspiration of Federico García Lorca will be performed together for the first time by Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo in these concerts.
This is a production of ACM Concerts for the Granada Festival, supported by the Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical. Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo (TAC) consists of singers Carmen Gurriarán and Verónica Plata, sopranos, Susana Ferrero, mezzo, and Isidro Anaya, baritone; André Cebrián, flute; Eduardo Martínez, oboe; Kathleen Balfe, cello; Joaquín Arrabal, double bass; Alba Barreiro, harp; Pedro Mateo González, guitars and banjo; Fernando Bustamante, mandolin; Carolina Alcaraz, Alejandro Sanz and Juan Antonio Martín, percussion; Nicasio Gradaille, piano; and Diego García Rodríguez, conductor.
George Crumb (Charleston, West Virginia, October 24, 1929), is one of the most important living composers on the current international scene and a key figure in the evolution of North American music in the second half of the 20th century. His enormous devotion to another of the most necessary artists of the 20th century, Federico García Lorca, led him to put music to a large number of texts by the poet from Granada over a period of half a century. His first approaches to Lorca’s work date back to the early 1960s, a decade in which he composed up to five works on texts from Libro de Poemas (1921), Poema del Cante Jondo (1921), Bodas de Sangre (1931) or Yerma (1934), but especially of Canciones (1927) and El Diván del Tamarit (1931). After a period of more than 15 years, he returned to Lorca in the mid-80s to put music to Canciones Infantiles, included in the poetry collection Canciones. And it is not until more than two decades later, and already at a very advanced age which hasn’t seen his passion for Federico diminished, that he faces his last three cycles so far, composed consecutively between 2008 and 2012.
Taller Atlántico Contemporáneo has a long history of dedication to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, with special attention to Spanish and very particularly Galician composers, of whom it has premiered countless works, many of them dedicated to the ensemble. This Crumb-Lorca Project is an idea on which the TAC has been working for some years and that acquires a special significance for being carried out at the Federico Garcia Lorca Center in Granada. The TAC made his presentation at the Granada Festival in 2014 with a very interesting proposal that included Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, along with the absolute premiere of Cinco Guerreros by Sebastian Mariné, commissioned by the festival. On that occasion, the link between the two works was painting, through the work of Mark Rothko and José Guerrero, who was from Granada and was influenced by Rothko after meeting him in New York.
Stefano Palatchi, bajo The Spanish bass Stefano Palatchi has consolidated his international career thanks to his admirable vocation for theatre, his attractive timbre and his much applauded expressive faculties. The bass, from the city of Barcelona, studied with Maya...
