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Josep Vicent Frechina
Certain music seems to be chiselled in the night; it smells of night, exudes night through all the stitches of the staff. It has something in its appearance, in the feeling catching its architecture, in the emotions that it inspires in the listeners, that certainly recalls the nocturnal universe and ripples the secret shadows that we all have hidden deep.
It is not necessarily tragic or sad music: its nocturnity is not about the nature of its elements. It stems from sensual rather than rational reasons, from a tight and profound link to the very sensuality of the night, that moment devoted to doubts and gloomy mood, when inner ghosts are unchained and, even if you are in good company, the loneliness imposes its unquestionable hierarchy.
I’ve got the impression that Artaica, with the treatment given to the songs included in this premiere, wanted to paint them as night, to light them up as night, to scent them as night.
They might be imagined as well under the bright sun at noon, as Picaina, suggesting features of cant de batre, ancient ballads that became lullabies, as the well-known Mariner, or groovy klezmer songs written to scan the unbridled joy of a wedding, as in Lustige Hasidim. They all change with a fit dress – piano, bass, clarinet or violin… – they move to a stage of gray nuances and its melancholic string is subtly tighten. Then they leave the familiarity of their melodies and their original condition (traditional ballads, havaneres, cants de batre, cants d’estil, jotes o parados de nova planta) to build an unprecedented genre touched by the new urban and nocturne expressivity, perturbing and magnetic at the same time, that Artaica’s mood gives to them.
A new expressivity that enchants us with its sofisticated charme of sharp mediterranean lineage and moves us inwardly making trill our secret darknesses.
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