Neu Records releases the three string quartets by Joan Magrané, performed by Quatour Diotima.

It is extraordinary, in the negative, how difficult it is to find recordings of contemporary music by Spanish composers. One of the rare exceptions is the recent release, through the Barcelona label Neu Records, of Madrigal, an album that compiles the three string quartets composed to date by the Reus composer Joan Magrané.

And on this occasion we should also congratulate ourselves, because we have an outstanding recording, made in April 2022, in the Auditorio de Zaragoza, by the prestigious French quartet Quatuor Diotima. It should also be noted that Diotima was the quartet that gave the world premieres of quartets number 1 and number 3. The disc includes the title piece, Madrigal, string quartet no. 1 (Musik mit Gesualdo), composed between 2011 and 2012 (and revised in 2019) and premiered as part of the Voix nouvelles programme of the Fondation Royaumont on 22 September 2012 at the abbey of Royaumont, a few kilometres north of Paris; Alguns cants òrfics, string quartet no. 2, composed in 2013 and premiered on 1 October 2013 in the auditorium of the Ateneo de Bañolas, by the Quartet Gerhard, and ERA, string quartet no. 3, composed in 2018 and premiered the following year, on 3 May, in the Auditori de Barcelona. On 15 February 2021, Diotima performed the three quartets in the course of a concert held in the Auditorio 400 of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

As can be read in the record’s liner notes, “unlike many of the composers of his generation who seem to place themselves in a position of rejection of the past so as to be able to affirm their own ‘modernity’ with evident radicality, history echoes in the compositions of Joan Magrané”, and this is certainly the case with the three quartets, which in the aforementioned text is defined as music “incorporeal and at the same time rooted in history and performance practice, the melodic lines, although inspired by singing, become breath, and their interweaving builds a sound organism of which the composer highlights the almost physiological inner sound”. Curiously, the three quartets are not offered in chronological order: No. 1 is followed by No. 3 (ERA) and this is followed by No. 2… Madrigal (No. 1) takes up the spirit of the composer Carlo Gesualdo (whom he evokes almost subliminally in the last minutes of the work) in the title piece, that of the poetry of the accursed Italian poet Dino Campana in Alguns cants òrfics, in which a sonata by the 17th century Venetian composer Dario Castello is quoted. The most complex and roughest piece (and the longest, at almost seventeen minutes in length) is ERA, and it seems to have been placed among the other quartets, despite what the chronology of dates of creation might demand, in order to generate a greater contrast with the works it precedes and precedes in the recording.

The disc was recorded using a multi-channel microphone system built to record and recreate acoustic spaces in ten-speaker sound installations. The physical edition of Madrigal includes, in addition to the CD, a 24-page booklet with notes by Stefano Gervasoni – who taught him a master’s degree in composition at CNSMD in Paris – and a code to download the HD version of the album (24bit and 96kHz) in stereo and 5.1 surround formats.