Quartet Neuma performs this week in Menorca and Panticosa.
The Spanish flute quartet Neuma is giving two live performances this week to present their album Origen. Today, 18th July, they are performing at the Teatre des Born, in the Spanish town of Ciudadela, on the island of Menorca, as part of the programme of the fiftieth anniversary of the Festival de Música d’Estiu de Ciutadella, and on Wednesday they will perform at the Festival Internacional de Panticosa “Tocando el Cielo”, in the Pyrenees of Huesca.
Neuma is made up of four flautists – Raquel Díaz Esquiva (Bigastro, Alicante, 1992); Anna Pujol Contreras (Viladecavalls, Barcelona, 1992); Alejandra Villalobos Cortés (Talavera la Real, Badajoz, 1988); and Estela Córcoles López (Almansa, Albacete, 1987) – who met at the Higher School of Music of Catalonia (ESMUC, for its acronym in Spanish), as students of the flautist Julia Gállego. In 2012 they began to work together with this unusual musical structure, for which there is hardly any historical repertoire: perhaps the best known are the compositions of the Czech composer (and flautist) Anton Reicha (Prague, 1779-Paris, 1836), who wrote 26 quintets for wind instruments. That is why Origen, their self-released album in 2019 through crowdfunding, is made up exclusively of pieces by contemporary composers: the Slovenian Anže Rozman (1989), whose works Little Suite of Mythological Beings and Aqua Et Ventus are performed, and the Russian Andrey Rubtsov (Moscow, 1982), present with the three movements of Flowers of the Sun, as well as the French Anthony Girard (New York, 1959), whose work Printemps des rivières, a piece composed in 1994, still under the influence of the mystical minimalism of Arvo Pärt, is rescued.