Costa Blanca Arts Update – Orquesta de Valencia under Trigueros and guitarists in Alicante

Two concerts in five days might sound quite a lot, but we achieved that by skipping the others on offer. But could one imagine two more different musical events? How many times across two concerts have you been presented with orchestral music and solo guitar comprising ten works, seven of which you have never hear before and featuring no less than four composers who are completely new to you? And this comment comes from someone who has a personal library of recordings that feature almost five thousand different composers… 

The Orquesta de Valencia under José Trigueros gave their concert in La Rambleta Arts Centre in Valencia. The acoustic of the hall might be a little too dry for music, but it must have served the orchestra’s purposes well for their recording session.

It began with the Serenata Española by Miguel Asins Arbó, who was known for writing music for film and television. This was an atmospheric piece that made its point by understatement, which is not a word that would apply to Keiko Abe’s Prism Rhapsody No2. This is a highly virtuoso concerto for two marimbas and orchestra. The solo parts were played by Josep Furió and Luis Osca with the kind of expertise that leaves an audience breathless both from exhaustion and admiration. There is a lot to do for the musicians in this piece, which is roller-coaster excitement from beginning to end. But it is also highly crafted music, skilfully constructed to do more than merely shimmer in the light. It was a piece of contemporary music that was rapturously received by the audience, prompting the players to offer an encore that allowed them to show off a more reflective side of their instruments.

After the interval, we were treated to a superb reading of the Symphony No10 by Shostakovich. Now this is a work that I have personally been listening to for more than fifty years. And still, it never fails to make its point. In live performance, it’s a work that comes alive beyond the pyrotechnics of its presence. It has a humanity and depicts a world that is a great deal more personal than many analyses might suggest. Particularly impressive was Trigueros’s reading of the scherzo, which he conducted from memory. Hearing such a work again is like meeting an old friend who always surprises.

The next trip was to Alicante to hear students from the Esplá conservatory. They were all on a master’s course in performance, so they ought to be nearing professional standard. The three of them were superb, but the last, Juan José Rodriguez, was outstanding. It was not what he played, it was how he played it. The pieces were shaped, communicative and faultless all at the same time.

Before him, Xuan Lien Liu gave a very clear and evenly paced account of the Sor Sonata. I feel that Sor was less at home with sonata form than with other ways of expressing himself, though I hesitate to belittle the towering achievement of this work. The form, however, appears to dominate the writing, but in this performance, there was a little hint of “going through the motions”. The playing was superb, if a little unspectacular, though this is no criticism because the music itself demands this kind of approach.

Miguel Verdu Andreu chose a much more ambitious programme. He started with the first movement of a sonata for guitar. The Amando Blanquer that followed was industrial in conception. The music was not composed using serial techniques, but it did employ atonality. The form was always clear, and it owed much to classical structures, but the material was like hardened steel. Again, the playing was completely convincing.

The last performer also started with an off-programme piece and continued with two works by a Valencian composer, Vicente Asenio. Who also had good connections with Alicante. The music was superb. The playing better.

This was completely modern guitar music, but there was more than a hint of the vernacular style about the compositional technique, hardly surprising when paying homage to Lorca. The Collectici Intim was a five-movement suite that had the clear structure of a five-movement single work. There was a musical sense to the overall shape, a sense that was admirably conveyed by the expert, Juan José Rodriguez