The sixteenth edition begins this Friday with the premiere of four works commissioned by the Auditorio de Tenerife
The Contemporary Music Festival (FMUC) returns this Friday, May 29, at 7:30 p.m. with its sixteenth edition, spotlighting tenor Airam Hernández and percussionist Verónica Cagigao in a premiere-rich performance. The duo will debut four commissioned works for the Auditorio de Tenerife in the Chamber Hall, created by composers José Luis Perdigón, Mario Carro, Samuel Aguilar, and Sergio Blardony. Percussion students from the Professional Music Conservatoire of Tenerife will join the concert as well.
The concert starts with Enceladus, by José Luis Perdigón, a work that attempts to portray the propagation of sound through atmospheres other than our own. Drawing inspiration from silent and inhospitable realms, the composition blurs the relationships and limits between sound and gesture, treating them as layered realities. The work invites us to enjoy a porous experience in which the boundary between what we see and what we hear, between what is perceived and memory, becomes fluid, allowing the imagination to participate in the work and the work to breathe back.
Poemas de la Isla is the second work to be performed by Hernández and Cagigao. Mario Carro’s composition is a cycle of three songs for tenor and marimba, based on texts by the Canary Islands poet Josefina de la Torre. The chosen poems are Me busco y no me encuentro, Si ha de ser and Remolinos del aire, with Carro’s composition exploring the combination of tenor and marimba. The marimba provides warm, resonant colour, allowing several types of relationships with the voice, from schemes of accompaniment to more tightly woven interaction between the two performers.
Samuel Aguilar has composed Del Llanto, a piece for tenor, marimba, bass drum, triangle and pre-recorded audio, set to a text by Federico García Lorca. This composition is comprised of two sections. After a long introduction in which the acoustic texture achieved with the bass drum and triangle is combined with the singer’s gestures, the work undergoes a subtle transformation, segueing into a complex rhythmic section performed on the marimba and the heartrending text of Federico García Lorca, interpreted by Airam Hernández.
Sergio Blardony drew inspiration from a poem by Emily Dickinson to create …and Suddenness for tenor, percussion and four small electronic devices. The choppy quality of Dickinson’s poetry provides the musical work with discursive potential in the voice and the percussion. The poem on which the musical work is based also contains formidable explosions from which discourse inevitably emerges, supported by powerful phonemes employed in the work’s acoustic aspects, both as disruptive elements and to provide rhythmic continuity, an apparent paradox that helps to generate a peculiar musical construction.
Following each performance in the opening concert, the respective composer will speak to the audience about the work commissioned for this concert by the Auditorio de Tenerife. This interactive concert-dialogue format introduces the first of five festival events—one focused on pedagogy—being presented as part of the sixteenth FMUC, which began in 2010 under percussionist Paco Díaz’s direction.
After the opening concert, the festival continues with Variaciones sobre temas canarios, a new work by Francis Hernández (June 5). This is followed by concerts featuring Marta Klimarasa with Andrea Domínguez, María Vera, and Verónica Cagigao (June 6), and a solo performance by Polish percussionist Marianna Bednarska (June 7), which rounds out the FMUC program.
The tickets are available on the website www.auditoriodetenerife.com, at the auditorium’s box office or by dialling the phone number 902 317 327 from Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. There are discounts for students, unemployed and large families.