Gabriel Vicéns (b. 1988)
Mural (2021)
Sueños ligados (2020)
El matorral (2022)
Una superficie sin rostro (2020)
Carnal (2019)
Ficción (2021)
La esfera (2021)
David Bloom (conductor)
rec. 2022, Bunker Studio, New York City, USA
Stradivarius STR37292 [70]
Gabriel Vicéns is a young composer from Puerto Rico whose origins as a musician are rooted in jazz and Caribbean popular music. His background in those genres might suggest to some listeners that the works on this Stradivarius CD stoop to the kind of “fusion” or “crossover” that has been inflicted on classical music since at least the 1990s. They are, mirabile dictu, nothing of the kind. Vicéns possesses an impressive command of late 20th-century classical techniques and practices, including those from the related, but separate big-tent experimental movement. As evinced on the chamber-sized works on this disc, he segues between these various styles smoothly without devolving into eclecticism, fusing them into his personal and persuasive musical voice.
Vicéns’s characteristic pointillism is heard pronouncedly in Sueños ligados (“Enjoined Dreams”) for violin, cello, and piano, as well as El matorral (“The Thicket”) for Pierrot ensemble with vibraphone. In these works, Vicéns yanks his listeners along on a fascinating, zigzagging path that ventures from Webernian serialism, by way of Cecil Taylor, into reflective moments that conjure the work of Keith Jarett and Harold Budd.
In this release’s excellent liner notes by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Vicéns makes clear that he relies as much on inspiration from sources beyond music. No surprise, then, that the composer is also a painter and has a great affinity for Feldman, himself deeply influenced by the plastic arts, besides. Both of these interests are explicitly invoked in Mural for violin, clarinet, and piano—which begins this disc; its static, pensive middle section framed by a jaunty, post-Minimalist dance. The closing work on this disc, La esfera for cello and piano, also draws inspiration from visual media, in this case the 1998 Barry Levinson-directed sci-fi thriller Sphere, starring Dustin Hoffman. At times, the breezes of Caribbean rhythms very delicately and affectingly brush against this work.
Vicens’s sources of inspiration are interesting to read about, but his strongly-profiled music dispenses with programmatic crutches. This distinctive and well-crafted music demands that you enjoy it, and engage with it, as music.
Long ago, I think in an issue of Tower Records’ Pulse!, Einojuhani Rautavaara likened the situation of the present-day composer to that of a child with an overturned box of toys. Freedom can be a double-edged sword for many of today’s composers. Suddenly faced without the comforting parameters imposed by stylistic dogmas and unsure of their role within society besides, they attempt to jerry-rig “meaning” for themselves. Whether by reliance on opportunistic program music tropes, imagined notions of musical populism (which ironically remains stubbornly unpalatable to the mass audience it is purportedly addressing), or both.
For others, like Vicéns, freedom is nothing to fear—it is an opportunity to soar. This is a composer who cares if you listen, but will not resort to pandering in order to contrive a connection.
Néstor Castiglione
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Performers
Roberta Michel (flute)
Raissa Fahlman (clarinet)
Joenne Dumitrascu (violin)
Adrianne Munden-Dixon (violin)
Rocío Díaz de Cossío (cello)
Wick Simmons (cello)
Julia Henderson (cello)
Corinne Penner (piano)
Mayumi Tsuchida (piano)
Mikael Darmanie (piano)
John Ling (vibraphone)
Nu Wind Quintet
