VISIONS
of
SPAIN

On a plucked string, sound begins by disappearing.

 

Attack becomes resonance, resonance becomes memory, memory becomes silence. Yet silence keeps a trace of what has just sounded, and that trace shapes what we hear next.

 

This programme begins with music from Renaissance Spain, much of it written for the vihuela and heard here on the modern guitar. Voices enter and overlap until the physical size of the guitar seems out of proportion to the world of sound it is producing.

 

That sensation has a personal source. Years ago, in Sacré-Cœur in Paris, I heard a small ensemble playing zithers. In the vast church acoustic I could not identify what was making the sound; it seemed to belong to the air rather than to any visible object. Only afterwards did I realise how small and physically unassuming the instruments themselves were. I have never forgotten that moment when the sound seemed to exist before the instrument that made it.

 

I recognise something similar in this repertoire. Polyphonic lines can rise one after another like smoke in a cathedral, coloured by stained glass, while bell-like sonorities and metallic brightness give way to warmth, shadow and silence. The audience’s concentration becomes part of the experience. The room seems to grow still from within the music itself, each fading resonance opening space around the next.

 

Sound and colour have always seemed closely related to me: both emerge from a spectrum, and both are transformed by the way their elements combine. Harmony, resonance and tonality mix those elements into individual sound worlds. Seen in that light, the search for new sound does not belong to any single century. Milán, Narváez, Mudarra, Fuenllana and Valderrábano were not simply representatives of a period. They were individual imaginations — experimental, contradictory, sensual, severe, devotional and playful. We have been sitting with some of the most original musical minds for centuries. Perhaps it is time we listened to them that way.

 

The recital does not unfold as a straight historical progression. Chronology moves forward, but listening begins to move in both directions. Each later work throws a different light backwards; the Renaissance, once heard, continues to colour what follows.

 

From the inward concentration of the vihuelists, Sor opens the guitar outward. Melody and accompaniment separate, the register widens and the long span of the Fantaisie élégiaque makes the instrument seem to breathe on a different scale.

 

Placing Rodrigo’s Zarabanda lejana after the vihuelists was deliberate. I expected the connection between these musical worlds to become audible; what I did not anticipate was quite how powerful it would be in performance. The delicate acciaccaturas seemed almost like bird calls above sparse, repeated chords reminiscent of Milán — brief portals between centuries. Rodrigo remains unmistakably a twentieth-century composer, yet the Renaissance seems to re-enter through another door.

 

Ohana changes the perspective again. In Tiento, Spanish gesture is fragmented, overlaid and intensified: colour can feel cubist, raw or difficult to decipher, as though different images of Spain have been broken apart and reassembled. The beauty lies not in easy surfaces but in the intensity of the experience. After that, Guerau’s Canario does something unexpected. We return to dance, variation and an earlier musical language, but we do not return unchanged. Its apparent familiarity has been altered by everything heard in between.

 

Once the music begins, the centuries refuse to stay in their places. Music written centuries apart can disturb, illuminate and reframe what surrounds it. A sixteenth-century fantasia can sound startlingly immediate and experimental; a twentieth-century work can reveal something deeply rooted; and a nineteenth-century piece can suddenly seem the stranger in the room.

 

The programme also resists the idea of a single, fixed Spain. Sacred polyphony, private fantasia, dance, Romantic expression and twentieth-century fragmentation do not add up to one national image. They are different acts of imagination, connected by recurring questions of colour, memory, faith, desire, rhythm, solitude and the transformation of inherited forms.

 

The guitar stands at the centre of that exchange not as a replica of a vanished instrument, but as an instrument of the present. Finger meets string now. Its immediacy of touch, rapid decay and extraordinary capacity for colour allow music separated from us by centuries to become physically present again.

 

Five centuries separate us from the vihuelists, but the instant the music sounds, that distance is no longer the most important thing. What was imagined centuries ago passes through living hands into another person’s listening.