Tomás Marco was born in Madrid in 1942 and studied with
Maderna, Ligeti, Boulez and Stockhausen among others. This might
lead one to expect a dyed-in-the-wool avant-gardiste
but in fact the music on this CD is more conventional. We are
told in the booklet that Marco has won a series of international
prizes, has worked extensively in Spanish education and “currently
devotes his time exclusively to composition and writing about
music”. He has also worked as a critic.
All three symphonies on this disc have subtitles - as, it seems,
do all the composer’s symphonies - which explains something
about the nature of the music. The second is subtitled Closed
space, and the composer explains that he was “interested
in exploring the creation of a single, compact, self-contained
space.” What we actually get is a series of often quite
interesting textural ideas juxtaposed and contrasted with each
other. That said, there is no real sense of progress towards
any particular goal here. The composer states that “the
orchestration is massive” but this performance at least
- there has apparently been a previous recording - does not
convey any sense of an exceptionally large group.
The much later symphony Gaia’s Dance is a different
matter altogether, a continuous series of three dance movements.
The first explores the dance music of Africa and Latin America
under the subtitle of the old proto-continent Gondwana,
and sounds rather like a more modern version of some of Villa-Lobos’s
more ‘ethnic’ scores. The second movement, named
after the old northern proto-continent Laurasia, is a
similar ‘take’ on the music of Europe and Asia,
but the only readily identifiable elements in the music appear
to be Indo-Arabic in flavour; India was not in fact part of
the Laurasian continent, it drifted north at a later geological
period - but never mind. The final movement embraces the dance
music of the world as a whole - it is named after the primeval
super-continent Pangaea - and the composer states that
the synthesis includes “modern popular dance music”.
Of this last element there is no detectable trace whatsoever
apart from the use of two modern drum-kits. The style of the
music owes much more to The Rite of Spring than any popular
element. Still it is all quite good fun.
The latest symphony on this disc is based on Marco’s concept
of the sea, which he states has always been an inspiration in
his music. It consists of two movements. The first, Nun,
is a depiction of the Egyptian god of water creating the oceans
out of primordial chaos. The music is dark and suggestive more
of the ocean deeps than their sunlit surface. The second movement
is a depiction of Okéanos and brings us nearer
to the light, with some quite impressionist reflections of Debussy
evident on occasion. The whole symphony is linked by elements
of mediaeval Spanish music by Martín Codáx, which
the composer states in his note “runs through my work,
in fragmented fashion, and at certain points becomes a block
within which everything crystallizes, unchanging except for
the timbre. The dialogue between the Codáx material and
that of Nun and Okéanos respectively allows
the work to unfold as if in a single, extended breath.”
Now if this is an example of Marco’s writing - and it
seems to be an accurate translation of his original Spanish
- one hopes that he is not spending too much time “writing
about music”. If it means anything - and the prose is
pretty murky - it would appear to suggest that the whole work
is monothematic and unitary in style. It is neither. The Codáx
material is readily identifiable some of the time. Its treatment
suggests the methods of Britten in the church parables. The
rest is, like the Second Symphony, a series of disparate
textures - often of interest and enjoyable in themselves - which
stand however resolutely in solitary isolation and apart from
each other. The effect is perhaps best appreciated if one regards
the whole score as a soundtrack for an unmade documentary film
on ocean life. Indeed it would work very well as such.
The symphony as a whole is entitled Thalassa, named after
the primeval spirit of the sea. There is another work of this
title: the only symphony of Sir Arthur Somervell, written in
1912 and popular at one time for its slow movement written in
memory of Scott. There is a broadcast performance under Adrian
Leaper which can be heard on the internet; but this is a symphony
which surely stands in need of a commercial recording - one
has just been issued on the Cameo Classics label and a review
is impending.
Over the years Naxos and Marco Polo have put us greatly in their
debt with their series of recordings of music of the Iberian
peninsula in the post-Falla era. One thinks with especial gratitude
of their recordings of the marvellous works of Joly Braga Santos.
Unfortunately this current issue is not one of the essential
issues in that series; nor is there anything very obviously
Spanish about any of the music. There is quite a lot of the
music of Tomás Marco available on disc nowadays, but
it all seems to be in very much the same style.
The orchestral performances appear - so far as one can judge
in the absence of a score - to be excellent and resourceful,
rising successfully to all the many challenges presented by
the composer. The marvellous and always-responsive Serebrier
brings understanding and a sense of brilliance to the scoring.
It’s just that I would have preferred him to have been
conducting Serebrier. The recording is excellent, clear and
precise, and one can hear everything the composer intends even
if the harp is perhaps a fraction too close to be realistic.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Malaga Philharmonic Orchestra/José Serebrier 