Cantos do Mar e da Noite (Songs of the Sea and the Night) was the title given to a recent performance of works by Fernando Buide at the Spanish Embassy in Berlin; and while either the sea or the night did make oblique appearances in each of the three pieces – all settings of texts by Galician poets – they were, in every case, only points of departure for larger meditations on longing, sorrow and the human capacity for cruelty. Although the evening suggested the familiar structure of a Liederabend – soprano María Hinojosa was accompanied by the composer at the piano – none of the pieces were straightforward enough to be described as songs; instead they emerged as something closer to captivating micro-dramas in which the concentrated passions of the texts were refracted into a series of deeply enthralling episodes.
The opening piece was a setting of a poem by Rosalía de Castro in which the narrator imagines herself as a bird flying through the night to sing the dawn chorus in her homeland, only to acknowledge that her corporeal self must remain far away in sorrow and tears. The piano introduction at times suggested the ethereal floating harmonies of Debussy, and also occasionally the urbanity of Ravel or Poulenc, although there were occasional moments, sometimes no more than a chord or a single note, that managed to suggest flashes of darkness beneath the placid surface. Against these vague hints of uncertainty the opening soprano lines possessed a pronounced sense of quiet longing, as though the very notion of home had been rendered abstract by its distance. Although the second section of the piece seemed to look even further inwards, in the final section the piano proceeded with a heightened sense of resolve, while the vocal line grew more florid (a fact which posed no problems for Ms Hinojosa, who integrated the ornamental flourishes into her delivery without losing the essential clarity of tone that defined the performance).
If the piano part of the opening piece had provided the vocal part with unusually distinguished accompaniment, in Medea, the evening’s second work, the piano took on a far more directorial role in the construction of the drama. The piece, from a poem by Xesús Pisón, offered an elliptical monologue from the perspective of one of classical mythology’s most fascinating figures; and yet it was the searching invention of the piano as much as the internal wrangling of the text that made the piece so consistently compelling. The forceful chiming chords that opened the piece seemed almost alien, and while the playing eventually settled into a more conventionally pianistic tone, the early part of the piece seemed determined to avoid the centre of the keyboard, balancing high dissonant chords with rumbles from the lowest notes.
While the piano had moved beyond mere accompaniment, often pursuing explorations that seemed distant from the vocal line, there was always a sense that the two were working towards the same purpose: the soprano part moved between moments of quiet radiance and tense restraint, while the piano, for all its variety of approaches, provided a solid superstructure for the text. In one of the more arresting moments the piano was reduced to little more than a single repeating note, a pulse around which all other musical events came and went; even when the note itself was absent, one could sense its presence beneath the chords that pushed the piece towards its inevitable conclusion.
For the evening’s third and final work, Ms Hinojosa and Mr Buide were joined by hornist Simon Lewis. The piece, a setting of Nao de sangre (Ship of Blood) by Valentín Paz Andrade, was considerably more ambitious in its scale – it lasted around twenty-five minutes – but also arguably the evening’s most cohesive work; while it was still closer to a chamber drama than a conventional setting, its varied episodes, some purely instrumental, were more seamlessly integrated into the larger structure that gave the work both its subtle momentum and its unity of purpose.
Throughout the piece the horn and piano remained generally aligned: the nature of the horn part ranged from melodic to textural, sometimes veering into the realm of extended technique, but it always seemed linked to whatever mood the piano happened to be conjuring; by contrast, the horn often felt distant from the soprano, as though the two were co-existing uneasily within the same piece, held in balance only through the effort of the piano. This division of resources was perhaps crucial in giving the piece its sustained tension. Even compared with the previous pieces, Nao de sangre had fewer sudden shifts in tone: despite the occasional unsettling horn interjection, the soprano and piano conspired to create a sense of extended desolation, which reached its greatest height when Ms Hinojosa’s haunted lines wrapped themselves around what amounted to little more than a pulse from the piano, ornamented sparingly with surrounding notes.
The hypnotic calm of this moment was ruptured by an unexpected rapid-fire horn and piano interlude, but even these exertions soon gave way again to the presiding quiet of the earlier section, eventually reaching a fascinating passage in which the horn blew directly into the piano; although the piano played no notes, the deployment of the sustain pedal allowed the room to fill with ghostly overtones. A two-note figure, in which the pulse of the earlier part could still be felt, emerged from the near-silence and propelled the piece to its emotionally ambiguous conclusion. While all of the evening’s pieces had been compelling in their own very different ways, it was the restrained despair of Nao de sangre that continued to reverberate as one left the auditorium and headed back into the night.
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