Orquesta Barroca de Granada / Íliber Ensemble / Darío Moreno SEBASTIÁN DURÓN La Guerra de los Gigantes

                                               LA GUERRA DE LOS GIGANTES

Orquesta Barroca de Granada / Íliber Ensemble / Darío Moreno SEBASTIÁN DURÓN La Guerra de los Gigantes

Sebastián Durón is usually recognized as one of the leading Spanish composers of theater music, although this repertoire is barely performed nowadays, even in concert version. As far as we know, ten complete scores of Durón’s stage works have been preserved, four of which are entirely sung, a number that is higher than that found in theater music by other important Spanish musicians of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Juan Hidalgo, Juan de Navas or Antonio Literes. The fact that, in his theater music, Durón uses both the conventions of 17th-century Spanish court theater and some elements of the dramma per musica has placed these pieces in a diffuse and poorly understood territory, unlike what happens with the works of Hidalgo and Literes, repertoire which has been studied better. For some scholars, the theater music of Durón is incoherent due to the introduction of elements that are unfamiliar to the Spanish court theater, in contrast to the great dramaturgy devised by Calderón de la Barca and Hidalgo. On the contrary, for other scholars, the music of Durón is remarkable for its openness to modernity, although it is a timid modernization against the determined Italianization that is observed in Literes and other later musicians. In our opinion, however, Durón’s theater work exhibits great originality and drama in itself, which is hardly understandable if we approach it with the abstract models that face tradition to modernity, or Spanish to Italian.

Marta Infante / Jorge Robaina DVORÁK Songs

Between 1874 and 1878, the young Antonín Dvorák received help from the Austrian government to compose musical works. At that time, he was a promising composer who, having been brought up in Bohemia, not only spoke German but also demonstrated a profound knowledge of the Central European musical tradition. The composer, with all this, very quickly faced reality: in the Vienna of that time what they wanted of a Czech composer was music that sounded Czech, not German. Of the works he wrote in those years, the one that caught the publisher´s and Brahm´s attention was his song cycle, Moravian Duets. They particularly stood out if we keep in mind, as mentioned by Michael Beckerman, that to the Bohemian composer the Moravian culture was as foreign as any other. This is how history, with its selective forgetfulness, has prolonged for years the European rule that has been to label Dvorak a nationalistic Czech composer and author of various worthy symphonies. That he left more than a hundred songs written, that his inspiration went far beyond Bohemian folklore and that he was one of the most prolific Opera composers of his time are irrelevant questions. This recording from Spanish mezzosoprano Marta Infante and pianist Jorge Robaina gives us an opportunity to hear some songs that seem to have been written out of their time.