Vistas Furtivas: The Music of Juan Campoverde Fonema Consort

Cover Vistas Furtivas: The Music of Juan Campoverde

Album info

Album-Release:
2020

HRA-Release:
07.02.2020

Label: New Focus Recordings

Genre: Classical

Subgenre: Chamber Music

Artist: Fonema Consort

Composer: Juan Campoverde, Vistas Furtivas

Album including Album cover Booklet (PDF)

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FLAC 44.1 $ 13.20
  • Juan Campoverde (b. 1964):
  • 1Umbrales I07:04
  • 2Topografías08:37
  • 3Basalto (Version for Voice, Alto Flute & Electronics)10:47
  • 4Muna II09:06
  • 5Umbrales II06:43
  • Los Lugares del Deseo:
  • 6Los Lugares del Deseo: I. Vestibulum02:44
  • 7Los Lugares del Deseo: II. Corpus Delicti01:53
  • 8Los Lugares del Deseo: III. De La Cartografía01:48
  • 9Los Lugares del Deseo: IV. La Miel de La Higuera03:50
  • Total Runtime52:32

Info for Vistas Furtivas: The Music of Juan Campoverde



Chicago based ensemble Fonema Consort releases this beguiling collection of music by the Ecuadorian composer Juan Campoverde. This collection of works highlights his innovative compositional approaches to music for voice and guitar in both solo and ensemble settings, featuring soprano Nina Dante and guitarist Samuel Rowe alongside their fellow Fonema members.

Ecuadorian composer Juan Campoverde’s deeply personal music is steeped in sonic ritual. On “Vistas Furtivas”, Chicago based Fonema Consort presents four works for ensemble and two for solo guitar that excavate internal spaces, manifesting psychological and emotional impulses in sound.

The recording opens with the first work Campoverde wrote for Fonema, Umbrales I from 2013, while his newest work for the ensemble, Umbrales II is the second in the series, and is heard later in the recording. Scored for two sopranos, flute, and guitar, the pieces establish complementary expressive spaces for the different instruments in two settings of the same texts by Ecuadorian poet Efraín Jara Idrovo. In her notes, soprano and co-director Nina Dante describes Campoverde’s vocal writing as giving “performers the sense of speaking the language of the subconscious landscape.” Taut sotto voce vocal phrases build intensity before they emerge in brief hyper-expressive utterances. The guitar, in microtonal tunings, tolls bell-like harmonics and open strings, providing quasi-tonal pillars surrounded by brief gestural flourishes and timbral filigree. The flute acts as the glue between the percussive attacks of the guitar and the vocal melismas, with lines that expand and contract in dimension as the timbre is enhanced with trills and flutter tongue techniques. The works have an incantation quality, with each phrase renewing a sense of self-reflection and prayerfulness.

Topografias (1996) is the earliest work on the recording and the first of two solo guitar works, both played with sensitivity and virtuosity by Samuel Rowe. The guitar writing expands upon the language established in Umbrales I, with extensive use of notes between the fretting hand and the nut, pitches that are adjusted with the tuning peg, and left and right hand tapping. The result is a multi-dimensional texture within which Campoverde builds hybrid instrumental gestures over an expanded registral and timbral landscape. The second solo work, Muna II, opens with an accumulating electronics gesture that envelops a crescendo of right and left hand tapping. The electronics sometimes create a halo of pitch that extends the sustain of the guitar, other times one hears distant quasi-vocal sounds and pitch shifts within the immersive texture. While the relationship between instrument and electronics in Muna II is not a dialogue per se, their presence allows Campoverde room to create an expansive counterpart to the rarefied sound world he has discovered on the instrument.

Basalto integrates electronics into a duo of flute and soprano. Setting another poem by Idrovo, the work is inspired by the plight of the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador in the Pacific in the face of over tourism and environmental degradation. The electronics part is generated from manipulated recordings of whales off the coast of the island, as the flute and soprano swim through the distorted whale song.

The final four movement work on the recording is a setting of erotic love poems from a collection by Zapata, “La miel de la higuera.” Breathless trills, tremolos,and multiphonics bind soprano, flute, and clarinet sounds together in a sensual anti-dance in the first two movements. The third movement for solo voice is performed with an in-ear electronic track only audible to the performer; her sung responses are heard as a monologue to a dialogue only she is aware of. Guitar and percussion join for the final processional movement, a lyrical dirge closing this powerfully introspective recording. (D. Lippel)

Fonema Consort



Fonema Consort
consort: a group of instrumentalists and singers performing together fonema: (Spanish, phoneme) the smallest unit of speech, which distinguishes words according to their sonic quality.

These concepts define the essence of Fonema Consort as they commission, perform, and record new music that explores the possibilities of the human voice in an avant garde chamber setting. Known for their “enthusiastic embrace of daring new music” (Chicago Reader) Fonema is driven by a fascination with pieces that foster rich interplay of voices and instruments and that are characterized by deep expressivity. The ensemble is highly committed to presenting works by Latin American composers to US audiences and encouraging musical exchange between these regions.

Nina Dante
is a soloist, chamber musician, improviser and composer based in New York City. Musical experimentation and the continual discovery of the voice’s technical ability and emotive power are the inspiring forces behind her work. Hailed for her “amazing performance of vocal versatility by a uniquely gifted young artist” (Chicago Classical Review), Dante has performed at Resonant Bodies Festival, BAM, Lampo, Issue Project Room, Roulette, the Kitchen, National Sawdust, the University of Chicago’s Contempo, Performa, Indexical, Visiones Sonoras, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, the Experimental Sound Studio, New Music Miami, the Latino Music Festival, the Frequency Festival, Festival Interfaz, the Poetry Foundation, and the Renaissance Society, among others.

Dante is co-founder, manager and soprano of the avant garde chamber ensemble Fonema Consort. With Fonema and as a soloist, Dante has given been in residence and given performances at Oberlin Conservatory, Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, Scripps College, UNAM, the 113 Composers Collective, and New England Conservatory, among others. Dante’s recent compositions have been featured on the Resonant Bodies Festival, Indexical, the Center for New Music, the 113 Twin Cities New Music Festival and the Essential Indexical recent release Early MMXVIII.

Nathalie Colas
Hailed for her “floating, silky soprano” and deemed “a standout in acting and voice” (Chicago Classical Review), Nathalie Colas was born and raised in Strasbourg, France. She is a current soloist and founder of Third Coast Baroque, Petite Musique Collective, Liederstube, and new music ensemble Fonema Consort. Nathalie was recently heard in Chicago’s Haymarket Opera Company production of Cavalli’s Calisto, in Handel’s Messiah with the St Louis Bach Society, and in the title role of Rita by G. Donizetti in Switzerland. An avid recitalist, Nathalie studied art song with the late German baritone Udo Reinemann and regularly performs such repertoire (Symphony Center, Pianoforte Foundation, Omaha Under the Radar, Chicago Arts Club, Driehaus Museum). A graduate of DePaul University School of Music and of the Brussels Royal Conservatory, she completed her opera training at the Swiss Opera Studio/Hochschule der Kunst Bern. She was awarded 1st prize in the Music Institute of Chicago competition last winter.

Dalia Chin
Chicago-based Costa Rican flutist Dalia Chin is a founding member of Fonema Consort, the Chicago Composers Orchestra, and the Dante-Chin Duo, all of which are dedicated to performing music by living composers. She has been in residence and given performances at institutions including New England Conservatory, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Oberlin Conservatory, Harvard University, the Universidad de Costa Rica, Scripps College, UNAM, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, the 113 Composers Collective and North Central College; and in festivals and at venues including Visiones Sonoras, the Florida Flute Convention, Festival Interfaz, Omaha Under the Radar, the Ear Taxi Festival, the Festival Internacional de Chihuahua, the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo, the Teatro Sucre, and the City of Chicago’s Pritzker Pavilion. She has performed Pablo Chin’s flute concerto Inside the Shell with the Chicago Composers Orchestra, the Costa Rica Orquesta Sinfónica de Heredia, and the University of Wisconsin Whitewater Orchestra. She is the featured soloist on the album Three Burials, and can be heard on Fonema Consort’s albums Pasos en otra calle and FIFTH TABLEAU.

Dalia earned a Post-Masters degree from DePaul University, a Masters Degree in Flute Performance at Florida State University, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Flute Performance at the Universidad de Costa Rica.

Booklet for Vistas Furtivas: The Music of Juan Campoverde

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