The Lake: To--

This work was written in 1982 during a period when the composer was paying particular attention to vocal music in different chamber and symphonic formats. The breadth of expressive registers in the Edgar Allan Poe poem The Lake –mysterious and impenetrable, like so many of his texts– along with the wealth of different interpretations it suggests, configured the different elements of the musical discourse, from the simplest material, indebted to the serial score which provides the necessary unity to the whole work, to the formal dimension itself, characterized by the breadth of rhythm that moves the different sections that make up the composition. The use of the serial technique by the composer, used in just a few pieces at that time (reflected here in the motivic importance achieved by the intervals of second minor and diminished fifth, also known as diabolus in musica), is present here in a very flexible and personal form, determining both the horizontal deployment of the different thematic elements and the nature of the musical texture, marked primarily by the definition of certain harmonic qualities, which points to research that would only be fully developed years later. All this, along with a tremendous effort to be concise and austere in the use of the expressive media of the orchestra – large, though rarely used as a whole or even largely – keen to underline the mystery of the text and presided over by the central and solitary presence of the warm, full sound of the mezzo, the true guiding thread of the discourse, supported discreetly by a distant orchestra; its expansion constantly subject to the evolution of the vocal line, low and reserved. The work was distinguished in 1982 by the Second Prize in the II Composition Competition for Young Musicians of Spain.