Nordic light for contemporary mysticism

The Catalan composer Bernat Vivancos has expressed on numerous occasions, both in interviews and in public appearances, the fascination generated by the word “providence”, for that polysemy he has, which refers us both to divinity and to those goods, whether money or food, of which we gather to face the coming. Providence has wanted the premiere of its impressive Holy Week responsibility at the Peralada Festival to end up being, unintentionally its farewell letter for a Holy Father, Francisco, whom the composer felt so close that he even included a text of the Pontiff in his ‘Requiem’.

• Music:
  B. Vivancos.
• Interpreters:
  Latvian radio choir. Sigvards Klava, director.
• Date:
  April 18.
• Place:
  Peralada Festival.

Indeed, on the night of Good Friday it could be heard in the Church of Carmen de Peralada for the first time completely the collection of nine managers of Holy Week who, registering in the tradition of Tomás Luís de VictoriaBernat Vivancos brings its contemporaries as a totally different work for totally different ears.

Vivancos was fascinated by the music of Tomás Luís de Victoria when, with only eleven years, he sang them as a member of the Escolanía de Montserrat. Since then – and already surpassed the half century of life – the possibility of putting music himself to the texts in which the great teacher of Spanish music found Your highest inspiration. A commission of the Peralada Festival was made of the miracle.

Vivancos explained that these responsible people have been cooked over low heat, but without any encourage Very long fermentation process. Ingredients have not been joined here while the perola is removed with a ladle, but a matter has been transformed with the passage of a lot of time to give life to something new.

On the basis of the victory polyphony assimilated during the years in the Escolanía, the Catalan composer has bossed a work with his own voice. The score shows from the first compass a will to sound simple, without ornaments, with nothing that can be left over. It is written for six voices A Cappella, which alive squeezes and takes the most. With that Media Parkit is able to take us from the modal and tonal sounds to some harmonic daring, without any complex to use one or another resource, but always with a very clear purpose: to transmit the emotion of some texts extracted from the gospels that narrate the passion and death of Jesus on the cross.

This point is precisely the key to the entire work. Vivancos is able to translate that emotion and that drama into sounds that, at the same time, They evoke the Renaissance and are directed to the contemporary public. The meditative state in which it permeates each syllable is, definitely, a universal message and that is above confessionality.

Of the ancient composers, with Tomás Luís in the lead, Vivancos takes taste and especially intelligence when creating a Rhetorical and emotional device Around each word. See, for example, the “suspendit” with which ‘amicus meus’ ends, with the increasingly long notes and a chord that at the same time creates light and instability, leaving, precisely, suspended the musical resolution.

On the other hand, he does not hesitate to give up the separate treatment of the voices to seek homophony in the passages that require it. In the last responsibility, ‘Sepulto Domino’, after an hour of delicate polyphony, homophony impacts listeners to narrate, almost to blows, how the body of Christ is buried and put into custody of some soldiers. A Wonderful detail which illustrates the detail with which the whole work has been written: the same chord we hear at the beginning in that “suspendit” serves to bury Christ in the cave sealed by a heavy stone at the end of this last responsibility, since it is the one that is heard repeated in the three syllables of the last word of the work: “Do-Mi-no”.

The public, dismayed for more than an hour of music with a high level performed by the unbeatable choir of Latvia’s radio, kept a respectful silence at the end of the work, before applauding. Sincere reaction for sincere music. After, Synonyms dictionaries were missing for such a list. Bernat Vivancos Easter Managers are called to become a place in the sacrum repertoire without much delay.