Search - Ensemble 2E2M, Paul Mefano :: Luis de Pablo: Notturnino / Concerto de Camara / Dibujos / Cinco Meditaciones / Cuatro Fragmentos de Kiu - Ensemble 2e2m

Incredible playing of mixed musical content

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 02/01/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Luis de Pablo represents the first post war generation in Spain, a lawyer, his music has graced all the primary festivals of new music in Europe, not so much the USA,nothing at all. He writes incredibly for strings in any genre there, solo, duets or trios. These pieces are more colorful mixtures of winds percussion,piano and strings and reveals a certain surface playfulness, an affinity for the dance gesture I think. The Notturnino has a kind of wispy arid flush of colours, ongoing quite obsessed with not stopping any place for too long a time. I think we get(come to comprehend) the colours more from these durational bursts of fragments. Likewise the Concierto here though the proceedings stop to contemplate "hanging" chords from the piano,but again you have quick rushes of timbre,sharp clean, like overdetermined punctuations of phrase, or short poetic lines, clipped, fast sharp. We don't get to relative darkness until Dibujos, here with timbre barely audible pppp, we have nice clean textures flute, violin, clarinet and violoncello. de Pablo likes his players here to mold themselves together,no sticking out of the texture. And again the Five Meditations and the Four Fragments have similar Baroque like agendas for parcelling out colours, as nice un-noiselike actually beautiful flute fluttertonguing and gestures one at a time, There is nothing opaque here.There really is nothing deeply profound here,this is like music for the theatre.He does have more concentrated and focused works as his string music. But overall there is a mystery to de Pablo's music, he searches for an undefined image, he loves the "Night" it seems the form of the nocturne. Arnold Schoenberg once said that contemporary music should be performed only at night. Here Ensemble 2e2m are simply incredible players, sharp clean attacks, wonderful ensemble of shape and direction. You have real soloists at work here,like trapeze artists waiting to go across the canvas of the tent in mid air without a net. 2e2m plays with this sense of danger always."