Graciela Jimenez - Works for Solo Piano; Works for Piano an Cello

Graciela JIMENEZ (b.1965)

Works for Solo Piano; Works for Piano an Cello

En Los Ojos De Las Llamas (2013)

Tres Piezas Para Piano

Baguala (2004)

En La Quebrada De Humahuaca (2009)

La Luz De Enero (2006-12)**

Mediterráneo (2014)**

Dora De Marinis (Piano)

Matiás Villafañe (Cello)**

Recorded 28 August 2017 at Estudios Fort, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Cover photo: “Quebrada de Humahuaca" Jujuy, Argentina

‘The flesh that tempts with its bunches of fresh grapes / and the tomb that awaits with its funeral bouquets’ – Rubén Darío (Lo fatal)

‘The mountains bow before such sorrow / and the sweeping river ceases its flow / but prison bolts remain strong / and beyond them lie deep, dark cells / and deathly loneliness’ – Anna Akhmatova (Dedication from Requiem)

Graciela Jiménez appeared in my life just as I was ready to give up writing anything to accompany others’ work (unless, of course, it was an exceptional case I have written about in one of my books, in other words, a substitute father such as Mahler, Wagner, Alban Berg, Camus, Kafka, Zimmermann, Emmanuel Levinas or Karl Jaspers), when my thoughts were occupied with my advancing years and with confused ideas about the finite nature of all life, starting with my own. Quite simply, on the advice of a mutual friend, Graciela asked me to write a few lines about this album. I had my reservations. A composer I didn’t know wanted me to write an introduction to music I didn’t know, with unknowable repercussions in an unknowable future. But first, whatever I decided, I had to listen to the recording and give her my opinion, which, as I always say, is that of someone who is mad about music and not an expert.

I’ll be brief. By the time I’d completed the obligatory task of ‘thinking with my ears’ (to quote Adorno), I’d made up my mind to write this introduction even if it meant policing myself to write only a couple of pages, despite Graciela’s use of intertextuality (intermusicality) and her winning symbiosis of music and poetry meriting further reflection. En los ojos de las llamas (‘In the Llamas’ Eyes’, the title of this initially Lorcainspired album) makes me wonder about not only the motivation behind these works but also the meaning of intermusicality, the presence of distinguished poets and artists such as Federico García Lorca, Alejandra Pizarnik and Anna Akhmatova (and, secretly, María Elena Walsh) accompanying the composer as she asks questions that perhaps remain unanswered, and the meaning of their captivating and dazzling poetry, their nostalgia and that Andalusian-rooted inspiration that actually came from Russia (as my grandparents did) and found a home in Buenos Aires, or perhaps in Córdoba, the place where Graciela was born.

It was here that her father, a chemist (also a keen folk and tango musician, who took part in Granada’s Tango Festival and remains a devotee of the genre), and her mother (who gave up medicine, no doubt aware that science is merely the least creative part of reality) brought their girl into the world and gave her the space she needed to thrive. The outcome was Graciela winning a chamber music prize in Buenos Aires performing Piazzolla’s and her own works, moving to Granada to devote her life to music and, ultimately, this piano and cello album (recorded with Dora De Marinis and Matías Villafañe) that reveals, through her most expressive, melancholic side, a determination to unravel and correctly convey her message: intertwined relationships between music, poetry and photography, creating compositions that shun everyday banality and the mechanics of mediocrity and go straight to the heart of a battle for authenticity. It’s not that she always wants to achieve more for the sake of it, she just wants to take her explorations further.

Graciela has said she was inspired to write this album by a collection of photographs by Antonio Arabesco entitled Mediterráneo. Her works, most of which are characterised by sometimes obsessive repetition, are a rite of passage, a mark of her love for Lorca, Akhmatova and Pizarnik and of a deeply felt humanist desire to engage with their words and explore them in musical terms. Her way of bearing witness, therefore, is to turn the writings of these unique poets into notes on the page. I recall the words of my fellow writer Félix Grande when Lorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love were published: ‘We knew there had been a great love in the last years of his life, one that had in some way inspired the Sonnets. During the many conversations I had with Luis Rosales, he told me Lorca spent the days hiding in their family home endlessly revising these verses.’

Graciela Jiménez pays tribute to and breathes life into these poems (and others), giving them a pulse and a heart that is certainly not joyful but is capable of feeling the joy of making music and of summoning the most heartfelt of lines—including these, by Alejandra Pizarnik: ‘Silence / I bind myself to the silence / I have bound myself to the silence / and I allow myself to act’—whose sentiment is conveyed on many occasions in Graciela’s music, as silence surges like a soundless outburst, a silence indicating the presence of music at its most ambitious. You have to listen to the rests in her works (if her notes haven’t silenced us, it’s because we haven’t listened properly), which remind me of a beautiful poem by Rafael Alberti, a man I had the privilege of getting to know well over a three-year period, and who told me that Lorca read the Sonnets of Dark Love – set to music with such luminosity by Graciela—to him (and Luis Cernuda), when the poems were still in a gestational stage: ‘Above, the balcony of the cold, / the balustrades of the air, / the sky and my eyes, / below, a map: three rivers / and a crumbling bridge on which no one stands.’ Such is the silence Pizarnik wrote about and that Graciela imposes so often in her expressive quest. I have to admit it: my decision to stop writing this kind of introduction has gone up in smoke and Graciela’s music has convinced me that, once again, we can make our own plans, but someone, whoever it may be, can change our minds. The ‘fire of love’ (as Lorca would call it), the musical experience of Eros and Thanatos, the enlightenment occasioned by an encounter with the magnificence of poetry and the purifying flame (as I would call it) sparked by the shock of that encounter are all a constant and vital presence in Graciela Jiménez’s music.

Graciela, you’ve won me over by convincing me that music speaks truth when it combines eroticism with sadness, when its language is transformed not into the physics but the metaphysics of reality: and that implies an affirmation of existence. ‘The rest is silence.’ That silence framing the sound of a true presence, Graciela’s, after learning that one’s own true presence always lies in others. In the place where subjectivity is born (please excuse my pedantry). This is a composer who could use her own unique musical style to endorse the words of José Bergamín: ‘Had I been born an object, I would be objective, but as I was born a subject, I am subjective.’ The subject that is Graciela speaks her truth.

Arnoldo Liberman

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About the Works

En los ojos de las llamas (2013)

Dedicated to pianist Albert Nieto, En los ojos de las llamas (‘In the Llamas’ Eyes’) is a colourful fantasia brimming with quasi-Impressionist sonorities that evoke images of the northern region of Argentina, where the landscape becomes ever more austere and the vegetation is gradually reduced to its simplest, most elemental forms. Native to the Puna grasslands are llamas, scattered across and forming part of its arid beauty. This work develops organically, with constant transformations of elements that appear and disappear, creating superimposed ideas that slowly turn from small layers into crushing masses of sound. Brief stylised motifs suggest Argentinian folk dances or children’s songs, capturing a world of dreams and magic, one of marked textural and emotional contrasts, as if forming a collage of images. The music conjures the llamas’ arid home as seen through their enigmatic eyes; eyes that are tranquil, peaceable but also lit (and why not?) with a spark of mischief and fun.

Tres piezas para piano (1999)

En lugar de un prólogo (‘Instead of a Foreword’)

Caminos del espejo (‘Paths on the Mirror’)

Silencios (‘Silences’)

In 1999, Graciela Jiménez was invited to take part, as a pianist, in a poetry reading entitled La locura de vivir (‘The Madness of Living’), part of a ‘Women and Literature’ series organised in her adopted city by the provincial council of Granada. Graciela chose three short poems/fragments of poems by two of her favourite female poets, the Russian Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) and the Argentinian Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972), and set them to music, creating a trio of piano miniatures: an aphoristic form that suits her to perfection. A sense of the nocturnal hovers over the unreal atmosphere of all three pieces, and there is something of the dreamlike world of jazz here too. The character of the second piece in particular fluctuates between blues and tango, while remaining rooted in tranquil, dreamy poetic writing.

In the words of musicologist David Barbero Consuegra, ‘Graciela Jiménez’s Tres piezas para piano (‘Three Pieces for Piano’) is a little set of 19th-century-style miniatures: three short, evocative pieces that, despite their concision, carry an intense expressive charge, their descriptive nature hinted at by their titles. The composition, conceived as a re-creation of texts by poets Anna Akhmatova and Alejandra Pizarnik, addresses the idea of truth and purity in the human soul. This is music of smooth contrasts and rubato, in which the piano establishes conversational melodies before falling suddenly and emphatically silent, and music of organic fluidity, its discourse unfurling in a strikingly natural manner, as when someone sets out for a walk without a preplanned route. This free-flowing improvisatory style comes from jazz, a genre in which Jiménez feels completely at home.

‘En lugar de un prólogo (‘Instead of a Foreword’) opens the cycle with three tempestuous gestures (echoing the number of movements), which in fact turn out not to presage the more meditative tempo that follows and characterises the work as a whole. The score represents a prologue, a declaration of intent of what is to come. In Caminos del espejo (‘Paths on the Mirror’) ideas follow one another with great subtlety, like water droplets slipping down the face of a mirror: first one, then another, each tracing its own unpredictable route as it descends. Paradoxically, Silencios (‘Silences’) is the most impassioned of the three pieces as it has a greater dynamic range, density of sound and it is the longest. It is also representative of its composer’s characteristically fluent and introspective idiom.’

Baguala (2004)

This is a piano adaptation of a work originally written for the chamber ensemble of flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano and percussion. The melancholy nature of the baguala, a mournful folk tune from north-western Argentina, is present from the start of this pareddown portrait of the isolation, austerity and stark beauty of the Puna grasslands. The richness of its dense chords reflects their changing colours. An almost exact quotation from another folk tune, the vidala, appears halfway through the work, giving it the unmistakable stamp of the composer’s style, the power of the landscape and the profound emotions it evokes.

En la Quebrada de Humahuaca (2009)

Dedicated to the pianist Dora De Marinis, En la Quebrada de Humahuaca (‘In the Quebrada de Humahuaca’, a valley in the mountains of northwestern Argentina) is Jiménez’s tribute to fellow Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera. It was premiered by Spanish pianist Albert Nieto in 2010 as part of the Sixth Contemporary Music Festival at Granada’s Ángel Barrios Conservatoire. This is a work of considerable scope, demanding and virtuosic, echoing all the compulsive power of the rhythms of Ginastera’s Argentinian dances; what might be a chacarera sometimes turns into a stylised malambo, then, after a lyrical transition, it suddenly becomes a waltz that unfolds with a subtle rhythmic touch of Rio de Janeiro, but whose ostinatos again evoke the Argentina of Ginastera. This fades into a sad norteño melody, its outlines blurred by the composer’s characteristic rich chords, until, finally, we hear a recapitulation of the lively dance from the opening, before the work ends in a bloom of contrasting sonorities.

Albert Nieto has said the following about the work: ‘There are a number of reasons why it is such a genuine pleasure to perform this work, including the hugely idiomatic piano writing and the score’s frequent rhythmic and expressive contrasts. The dance rhythms pervading the piece, influenced by the composer’s place of birth, create a connection between the pianist and music’s most primitive component, dance. The musical elements mentioned above enable soloists to draw on their full range of technical, expressive and gestural resources and, as a result, to establish a direct line of communication with the audience. And after all, isn’t that music’s ultimate goal?’

La luz de enero (2006–12)

Soneto de la guirnalda de rosas (‘Sonnet of the Wreath of Roses’)

Llagas de amor (‘Love’s Wounds’)

El poeta dice la verdad (‘The Poet Tells the Truth’)

Soneto de la carta (‘Sonnet of the Letter’)

La luz de enero (‘January’s Light’) is an adaptation for cello and piano of Jiménez’s song cycle of the same name (recorded by soprano Elena Sancho Pereg and the composer in February 2012). This version was premiered at the Centro Federico García Lorca in Granada on 24 June 2016.

David Barbero Consuegra has written this analysis of the work: ‘Lorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love inspired Graciela Jiménez to write La luz de enero, a very personal reimagining of some of the poet’s vignettes. Her composition is proof of the fascination that Lorca’s texts continue to hold for artists today, because of their universal and eternal themes: “the anguish and pain of love”, to quote Graciela Jiménez, which end up hastening us obsessively towards death.

‘This is calm, reflective music, in which Lorca’s lines are conveyed with a rigorous measure that allows them to be fully savoured. But, inside this static, contemplative backdrop, imprinted by the predominantly slow pulse and omnipresent pedal notes in the lower part of the piano, the lover’s anxiety and uneasiness, his suffering of passions and longing for death because of a not-always-requited love, follow on from each other. These are emotions and atmospheres that this imaginative composer achieves by using contrasting elements, defined in the instability produced by the dancelike play of broken rhythms, the frenetic amalgam of time signatures, a rich palette of tempos and stuttering melodic designs.

‘Fundamentally based on a modal idiom, the songs making up La luz de enero possess a highly attractive diversity that blends passages of jazzy, impressionistic resonances with expressionist sound effects, with almost dodecaphonic traits. Also evident are associations with popular music, through irregular metres that assume the feel of transatlantic dances; qualities that result in a greater luminosity.

‘Above and beyond everything, the depth and beauty of this penetrating music by Graciela Jiménez incorporates new nuances into Lorca’s compelling Sonnets of Dark Love. And this is its most important achievement.’

Erika Martínez, meanwhile, has written the following: ‘A melancholy gust of wind jostles us and disappears, like a portent. So begins this heartrending musical journey through Lorca’s dark love. The songs portray a thicket of chiaroscuro silhouettes, a place in which the branches of violence and desire entwine. Wedding wreath, funeral wreath. There is something ready to explode in every modulation, a restraint that presages urgency and ends up casting us towards the tragic ecstasy of eroticism. The music calls on certain rhythms, cadences, ornamental motifs of traditional Andalusian song, but inverts or distorts them with highly contemporary sorrow. Shadow-like hints of songs by Britten, Webern or Eisler appear. The crisis of tonality has caused neo-Populism to contract; its harmonic and rhythmic fabric has been strangely, miraculously digested. Time has caught up not only with lovers but also with a dark sorrow torn to shreds. Every note encompasses the seed of an ancient tragedy where pleasure is blood and sexual desire is sacrifice. As in classical mysticism, there is no love without a wound.

‘These works draw us in by sowing a dark expectation, by alternating sensual epiphany and elegiac grief, by turning emotion into a narrative. The melody unfolds but leaves gaps: everything darkness does not want to reveal, an aura of secrecy. But the suspense pervading this cycle is not resolved. There is an atmosphere of constant persecution of the forbidden love that was condemned centuries ago by Catullus’s puritanical old men. While the sonnets eventually fuse together passion and death (reminiscent of Calvary), these pieces leave that fusion hanging by a thread. Desire seems to flow through them like a fateful yearning, which, before it has reached its end, begins again. Something is left floating in the air. A taut piano string, a disquieting trace of voice. The enamoured thread of fate.’

In this arrangement for cello and piano, the four songs lose none of their heart-breaking beauty, a quality enhanced by the velvety tone of the cello capturing the depth of Lorca’s poetry.

Mediterráneo (2014)

Despertar (‘Awakening’)

Primer silencio (‘First Silence’)

Como un espejo (‘Mirror-like’)

Ecos (‘Echoes’)

This piece was written to accompany photographer Antonio Arabesco’s Mediterráneo exhibition, which opened on 25 April 2014 at the Sala Aljibe in the Carmen de la Victoria (part of the University of Granada). The first recording of Mediterráneo was made by cellist Orfilia Saiz Vega, with Graciela Jiménez herself at the keyboard. The work comprises four short, austere movements, with echoes of modal music. In a minimalist, symbolist style, the writing evokes the Mediterranean, its culture and its spiritual and artistic values.

Dora De Marini