From memory to landscape

The beginning of the 20th century was not only the cradle of the aesthetics that would develop over the following decades, but also a crossroads of creators whose works reveal a look back, just before the emergence of a fierce avant-garde. This revaluation of memory, real or imaginary, and the alchemical search to distill an experience or a place from it into a score are the core of this recital, a timeless collection of various forms of treatment of this delicate creative substrate. As a prelude, Domenico Scarlatti's Sonata in C minor heads this album of fragments with a sheet of notes overflowing with rhythms and melodies experienced in the streets of his adopted Madrid. In the same way that an idea is recorded in a notebook, a snapshot prior to the possibility of photography, Scarlatti created one of the first examples of musical souvenir, of an exotic otherness, through the keyboard. The suggestion of mythical spaces of memory, often with that baroque idea of the character piece as its root, runs through the pianistic production of Claude Debussy. Connected by this aesthetic genealogy that looks towards a past that is outdated and longed for, many of Debussy's preludes stage a parade of characters who live in the literary imagination of their author, from dreamlike prints and imaginary landscapes to prototypes of the Commedia dell'Arte . The influence of Les Ballets Russes on Parisian aesthetics from 1910 onwards converges here in the pen of Russian composers such as Sergei Prokofiev , who in his neoclassical Sonata n. 5 creates a dress of frivolity and sarcasm to offer a distorted mirror of the classical past and decorate a work that is both urban and apparently dreamy. The pastel tones of symbolist images and the harsh neoclassical games find a confluence in the recent work of Marc Migó, which condenses the current expression of this filial piety towards the past itself. Starting from the idea of writing music "from a desert island", freed from commitments and following an unconditional inner voice, Migó captures in his notebook of preludes the irreducible seed of what leads him to compose. This intimate aesthetic search, between nostalgia, exoticism and dream, is condensed in this pair of childhood images, at the same time representatives of one of the deepest creative impulses: writing postcards from the margins of memory.