Raquel García Tomás: A Symphonic Bang In an interval of only five years, the composer from Barcelona Raquel García Tomás has found in the symphony orchestra the ideal instrument to make her musical universe explode. It is, however, a bang that has been forged little by little and that, when it becomes a reality, is more like a cherry blossom than a bomb. Like the flowers, García Tomás’s symphonic bang has been a long time in the making. Partly in the field of chamber music and opera, with which she has achieved her greatest successes to date. And partly in the field of fine arts, which have allowed her to sculpt her own language in which synaesthesia and dialogue between different creative disciplines play an essential role. This album allows us to see this explosion, which began in 2019 with the commissioning of Sonic Canvas and continued with the rest of the works it contains: Las constelaciones que más brillan, Blind Contours and Ara sí que ets divina. Raquel García Tomás often explains that, from a very young age, her perception was marked by synaesthesia: in music, she associates colour with heights, harmony and changes of register, rather than timbre. That is, when listening to higher or lower tones and certain chords, at the same time, her brain processes colours, shapes or textures associated with these sounds, which do not depend so much on the instrument with which they are played as on the combinations created between them and the evolution of the musical material. This is a detail that should be taken into account when listening to and immersing oneself in her music. This, and the fact that she began her training in the field of fine arts. The composer says that she was particularly attracted to large-format abstract paintings. She then focused on music and enrolled at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) and, later, at the Royal College of Music in London, where she obtained her doctorate as a specialist in interdisciplinary creation. Las constelaciones que más brillan The work is inspired by an illustration by Pere Ginard, in which we see a series of imaginary combinations of stars. Raquel García Tomás uses this starting point to create a work that expands little by little, like our visual perception if we go out one night to contemplate the stars in a serene, clear sky without light pollution. Soon we notice how our pupils dilate, and our eyes see more and more luminous points of light over the mountains. The composer achieves a clear physical effect by combining different sound planes, two of which stand out in particular: a subtle, earthy, firm and immobile substratum, obtained with the lower registers of the strings, and another around which the high-pitched sounds of the violins and the wind and percussion instruments revolve. Several motifs are repeated with what the composer describes as ‘slow, imperceptible, yet consistent changes’, evoking an ascent and descent similar to that which the celestial sphere undertakes every night, in its space of constant transformation. Ara sí que ets divina In Ara sí que ets divina, we do not find a direct evocation of paintings or illustrations, but it is striking that the text on which it is based is full of expressions with enormous visual power, such as de llum coronada, il·lustres lo brillant (‘of crowned light, you illustrate the brilliant’). It is a work for symphony orchestra and voice that brings together elements of the composer’s vocal and instrumental language. Commissioned by the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra to accompany a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem together with the première of two other works by Octavi Rumbau and Joan Magrané, the piece was written to pay tribute to the composer’s grandmother Carmen on the day of her hundredth birthday, with verses by the Catalan Baroque poet Francesc Fontanella. The result is a composition that evokes transcendence. The treatment of the vocal part is integrated like just another instrument in some moments, without renouncing its protagonism and clarity, so that it transmits the nuances of verses charged with intensity. Once again, we see the composer’s ability to control the appropriate tempos in order to place the climaxes and anticlimaxes that articulate the piece in a quiet back and forth reminiscent of a prayer. Blind contours II The work takes the clear link with the fine arts back up by referring to a type of exercise with which students of drawing are trained: it involves tracing the outline of an object or person without ever looking at the canvas or paper on which they are drawing. The result is a drawing in which the model is transfigured, but, thanks to some bizarre brain mechanism, we are usually able to identify it, even if only vaguely. It is a technique in which randomness plays an important role, as the person drawing never knows with total certainty where the pencil nib is or where his or her line has previously passed and where it has not. García Tomás incorporates this parameter into her work and leaves a generous margin of freedom to the performers, so that it sounds different each time. In the heading of the score, she appeals to the musicians, telling them: ‘Although the musical materials in this work are defined within a harmonic, gestural, dynamic and timbral framework, the performers have a certain freedom in deciding how to play them. Both the director and the performers must understand the discourse of this work as an opportunity to explore their own sound and creativity.’ More than in any other composition in this compendium, García Tomás starts from a clear yet abstract scheme to create a form that adapts to her way of conceiving musical sonority: that large-format painting that so attracted her when she was studying Fine Arts. Sonic canvas The disc closes with the first symphonic work she composed, a sound canvas on which she creates a testing ground. It is her first attempt at bringing her previous background in opera and chamber music to the symphony orchestra. Here we have a composer who still thinks in terms of chamber and contrapuntal writing, who knows very well what each instrumental group can give her, but who is still very much in the process of trying to control all the parameters with which a composer can play with a stave of these dimensions. Sonic Canvas was commissioned by the Joven Orquesta Nacional de España (JONDE) during the 2020 pandemic, and it is in this context that its complexity must be understood. The composer knows that she is writing for an orchestra of young musicians, who will have time to study all the nuances of the score and who will be able to dedicate more days to rehearsals than professional symphony orchestras usually have. That is why she dares to create a complexity that she will renounce in later works, but which is a necessary first step, an ideal laboratory in which to rehearse everything that will come later.