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JOSÉ LUIS TURINA
By José Luis Temes
(Notes for the booklet of the CD with Exequias and the Concerto for violin and orchestra – 2014)


José Luis Turina is one of the most engaging of the generation of Spanish composers born in the nineteen-fifties, along with other colleagues as notable as Francisco Guerrero, Alfredo Aracil, José Ramón Encinar, Jorge Fernández Guerra, José Manuel López and many more. Clearly, the mere mention of those other companions points to how musically heterogeneous the generation is, unquestionably a factor enriching the Spanish musical aesthetic of these recent years.
Grandson of the famed Joaquín Turina -one of the truest representatives of early twentieth century Spanish nationalism around the figure of Manuel de Falla-, Turina was born in Madrid in 1952. Following outstanding study at the capital's Conservatory, his public appearance as composer of Crucifixus (1979) began what was to be his brilliant creative trajectory. It has been said a thousand times that the key to the success of Turina's works -surely one of the most successful and widely-heard composers of his generation- has been his ability to synthesise tradition and modernity; that may be true to an extent, but we may prefer to find the cause of this esteem as «a sure value» in his music in the synthesis of innovative disquiet and a substantial craft, so that his music always has a great deal to say even to listeners not especially disposed toward novelties of language.
José Luis Turina has combined his work as composer with various management posts, all with the common denominator of musical education and a concern for the training of the new gen- erations: first teaching in the Madrid and Cuenca conservatories, then as an adviser in the drafting of the new musical legislation, which so comprehensively transformed musical education throughout Spain, and currently as artistic director of the Spanish National Youth Orchestra (JONDE).


THE WORKS ON THIS DISC

Following the early experience of Ligazón (a miniature opera premiered in Cuenca in 1982), the second vocal work on a certain scale by José Luis Turina was Exequias, in memoriam Fernando Zóbel. Two factors combined to foment this work's composition: on the one hand the sudden and unexpected death of the major painter Fernando Zóbel in June 1984 in Rome. Zóbel, who had maintained a good friendship with Turina, lived most of the year in Cuenca where he hung his astonishing collection of recent Spanish art (now the Cuenca Museum of Abstract Art), making him a very significant and much-loved person in that city. José Luis Turina has written: «l recall as one of the most powerful experiences of my life the silence which fell in the Plaza Mayor [in Cuenca) when his coffin arrived, not less moving than those accompanying him on foot to San Isidro cemetery. Thus my requiem ends with a "Processio ad coemeterium"».
The other factor was the annual commission to Turina, offered and still made to a Spanish composer by the Cuenca Religious Music Week (do not forget that at that time Turina was semi-resident in that city, teacher and director of its Conservatory) which has yielded such extraordinary fruits during its now more than fifty years. The work was premiered in the Old Church of San Miguel, on April 3, 1985, the day of Holy Wednesday.
It seems likely that, without the Cuenca commission, Turina's initial impulse as admirer and friend of Zóbel would have been to compose secular music (for want of a better expression) with greater or lesser burden of transcendence or humanist reflection. José Luis Turina has repeatedly stated his non-belief but also his profound respect for any other stance confronting the enigma of humankind. Being of open mind, and cultivated, Turina encountered no difficulty in placing his creativity at the service of Christian texts in the Misa de Exequias.
He did however opt for its modern version which, with a more optimistic view of life and the beyond, foregoes the "Dies Irae", replacing it in a more hopeful context with an "Alleluia".
Perhaps because of the dimensions of the church where the work was to be premiered but also in relation to the type of music suitable for the memory of a man as austere as Fernando Zóbel, Turina chose an intimate requiem, almost a chamber work, with a reduced orchestra of not more than forty and a chorus which may not be numerous; the chorus must also be specialised in Gregorian chant, and is entrusted with the enunciation in plain-song of each of the fragments making up the mass for the dead; only in the last movement do their voices joint those of the "conventional" chorus, and the orchestra. (Both choral roles may, as in this recording, be taken by a single vocal grouping).
This score caused great impression right from its premiere, directed by José Ramón Encinar, as part of the Religious Music Week which had commissioned it. It was later repeated in the church of San Pablo, also in Cuenca, under maestro Odón Alonso. This score is at the peak of its composer's thought, an essential part of the greatest achievements of the Spanish music of the last third of the twentieth century.
The Concerto for violin and orchestra and the Concerto for harpsichord and orchestra entitled Variations and differences on themes by Boccherini were composed at much the same time and, curiously, were premiered in September 1988 hardly two days apart.
The Violin Concerto originated in a commission from the Centre for the Diffusion of Contemporary Music and its then director Tomás Marco for a new work for the 1988 Alicante International Festival. The outcome was once more a bulls-eye, because the concerto, was to become one of the most important Spanish concertante works of recent decades.
The much-admired Victor Martín premiered the work in Alicante, with the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra under its then chief conductor Víctor Pablo Pérez, who have also made an excellent recording, and the violinist has subsequently had unforgettable successes with this concerto.
Turina divides the concerto into three clearly differentiated parts. The first is highly original in its construction as the violin sings openly lyrically over the timbre of accompaniment offered by the percussion alone on untuned drum-heads; the stringed instruments sometimes envelope the soloist, but always with noises and percussion sounds on the instruments. Such iconoclastic use of stringed instruments is in principle remote from Turina's usual style of writing, but is used here with a poetic detail far from the sense of mere effect so common in previous decades.
In the second movement, perhaps for the only time in Turina's output, we encounter extensive passages using the orthodox dodecaphonic system or, perhaps better put, endecaphonic, as all the series and transpositions have not twelve but eleven notes: G is always absent, causing the perfect geometry of the system and its derivative series to "hobble" in the way which so captivated Alban Berg. A highly successful transition follows this serial section, of strong and emotional character, built entirely on an ambiguous arpeggiated C Major-A minor chord. The last movement is the freest and most intense, making its way to the final silence, with a solo violin which is eventually infected by the percussion timbre, ending in the murmur of the light tappings on the instrument.



He Has It All
By Francisco Ramos
(Review published in issue no. 301 of Scherzo magazine, November 2014)


As recordings featuring music by composers from the Spanish generation of the 1950s are few and far between, each new release must be received with joy. This one by José Luis Turina (b. 1952) represents a significant addition to the discography, as it offers listeners the opportunity to get firsthand exposure to two examples of the exceptional craftsmanship of one of our most prominent composers. What is particularly striking is that Turina achieves this through the use of the most orthodox language, employing genres as well-trodden as the concerto with soloist. Turina's ability to reinvigorate and, it must be added, to do so in a pleasant and refined manner, the legacy of tradition (Gregorian chant in Exequias, the duel between violin and orchestra in the Concerto) is such that it is difficult to imagine his music not being widely embraced. Turina has everything it takes for his work to deeply resonate with the audience: a light touch, where the elements that make up the homage to Zóbel, which is Exequias, do not fall into pastiche, and a renewed approach, without ever losing good taste, in the confrontation between soloist and orchestra in the Concerto. Here, the use of percussion turns the work into a rara avis, as it is rare for listeners to encounter a dialogue between the soloist, following the traditional line of the violin, and the timbres produced by the percussion. The first section is particularly surprising in this regard, as percussion dominates the sound spectrum, creating a special charm in the listening experience. For the finale, Turina reserves the best: instead of closing the piece in a predictable manner, he gives prominence to the percussion, which, in a subdued tone, allows the work to fade into silence.



José Luis Turina: Turning Back to the 80s
By Germán Gan Quesada
(Review published in El arte de la fuga and on the website of La Quinta de Mahler, October 2014)


Exequias (In memoriam Fernando Zóbel), the work that opens this CD as a world premiere recording, is the second large-scale vocal piece in the already extensive catalog of José Luis Turina. Written in 1984 to mark the death of the painter, Exequias is a heartfelt tribute by our composer to one of the most prominent figures in the cultural life of Cuenca. Openly contrasting in its creative and emotional approaches, the Violin Concerto has its origins in a commission from the CDMC in 1988. The quality of the performances by the Orquesta de Córdoba, the Coro Ziryab, and Ara Malikian on violin, all under the tireless baton of José Luis Temes, seals an extraordinary recording.
After two previous releases -one conceived as an orchestral portrait (2008) and the other as an anthology of his chamber music (2013)- Verso returns with the music of José Luis Turina, showing us, with an attuned Orquesta de Córdoba and Coro Ziryab under the ubiquitous José Luis Temes, the orchestral stature that the Madrid-born composer had already achieved, barely in his thirties, in that 1980s decade when the "Movida" also shook the comfortable foundations of the Spanish musical avant-garde.
Of the two works included, only the Violin Concerto (1987) had a previous recording, though it was not widely disseminated (Col Legno, 2005). Therefore, Exequias, in memoriam Fernando Zóbel (1984) is an absolute premiere and, like so many commissioned works for the Semana de Música Religiosa de Cuenca, deserves a wider audience than the festival debut guaranteed; the result of Turina's personal encounter and friendship with the painter -one of whose beautiful riverine images graces the album cover-, these Exequias closely follow the liturgical model of the Officium defunctorum, both in form (except for the omission of the "Dies Iræ" sequence) and in musical content, as each of its parts is headed by a Gregorian chant setting of the office. From this structural premise, the orchestra acts as a "glossator" of the semantic and sonic content of the Gregorian core, which also serves as thematic material for the composer, as seen in the dense initial texture of the "Introitus" or in the melismatic intensification of the "Alleluia," often paired with a smooth homophonic choral concept that strikingly contrasts with the harmonic tension of the instrumental writing. This illuminates moments of enormous climatic power (the aforementioned "Alleluia"), convincing drama ("Tractus"), and melodic inventiveness ("Communio"), culminating in the "Processio ad cœmeterium" with a finale open to hope.
For its part, the Violin Concerto, whose solo part is spectacularly executed by Ara Malikian, summarizes a stylistic stance that, at the time, could be dismissed (rather than described) as postmodern and which, thirty years later, confirms Turina's intuition about the need for a healthy eclecticism: there is room both for timbral surprises, as in the opening of the first movement with purely percussive sounds, and for solo singing -in the imaginative scherzante second movement-, or the reinvention of tonal materials, announced in the cadenza leading to the final section. What derives from the "fragmentation" and expansion of a C major arpeggio -uncomfortable with the remnants of modernist dynamics and superimposed harmonic tensions- is resolved again in a sudden percussive passage, an objet trouvé that interrupts the placidity of the discourse before returning to the introspective atmosphere of the work's beginning: a reaffirmation of uncertainty as the driving force behind José Luis Turina's ever-alert aesthetic proposal.


PUBLICATION DATE
01/09/2014

PERFORMERS
Ara Malikian, violin
Orquesta de Córdoba
Coro Ziryab. José Luis Temes, conductor

CONTENTS
José Luis Turina (1952):

Exequias (In memoriam Fernando Zóbel) 1984 [41:40]
01 I. Introitus [5:17]
02 II. Graduale [6:10]
03 III. Alleluia [6:53]
04 IV. Tractus [8:42]
05 V. Offertorium [6:25]
06 VI. Communio * [3:21]
07 VII. Processio ad coemeterium [5:01]
(* Laura Llorca, flute)
First world recording

Violin Concerto 1987 [30:30]
08 I. [8:26]
09 II. [12:53]
10 III. [9:12]

1 CD - DDD - 72'20''