Señales - Paramo de Voces; Homenaje a Remedios Varo, etc

The Guardian 80

Arditti/Ensemble Signal/Lubman/Rosado/Ensemble Recherche
(Mode)

These five pieces by the Mexican born, British-based Hilda Paredes range across three decades. The earliest is Homenaje a Remedios Varo, five beautifully tinted yet rather introspective miniatures from 1996, composed for the Pierrot Lunaire ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, with the addition of percussion, and inspired by the work of the surrealist painter Varo, who was born in Spain but did most of her mature work in Mexico. Señales (Signals) for violin and ensemble (2012) is a tribute too – it bears the subtitle Homenaje a Jonathan Harvey, the British composer who died in 2012 – but is effectively a single-movement violin concerto written for Paredes’ husband Irvine Arditti, in which the violin’s gestures trigger the succession of wonderfully imagined textures that Paredes draws from.

Recuerdos del Provenir is also an ensemble piece, Paredes’ 2006 response to Ensemble Recherche’s invitation to a number of composers to write a piece based upon the Gloria Tibi Trinitas plainchant, while her vivid aural imagination is equally engaged in Páramo de Voces (Wasteland of Voices) in which the sounds of a solo piano (Alberto Rosado) are juxtaposed with recordings of electronic generated sounds and music from the south of Mexico, “Music that for me”, Paredes says, “Has a never-ending sorrow such as is instilled in so many of the country’s forgotten places.”