El Lienzo en el Espejo
Added on Wednesday, February 14, 2018 Posted by Robert Bettens
Be it through Time-The Time Traveller (2017)-, regal administrator of papal bulls and lavishness, or hidden inside a mythological box called Pandora (a two-handled jug, according to Myth), Madrid-born composer David Bazo's music clinks joyfully around author Artha Moreton's words.
Be it through Time-The Time Traveller (2017)-, regal administrator of papal bulls and lavishness, or hidden inside a mythological box called Pandora (a two-handled jug, according to Myth), Madrid-born composer David Bazo's music clinks joyfully around author Artha Moreton's words.
The images from the writer's fertile imagination intertwine with the musician's soft way of looking, a painter of stylish strokes and rotund affections. The Canvas in the Mirror is an interesting musical-literary project, joining with intelligence and sensitivity two sibling languages, walking together towards that chromatichall spanning 300 years of Mankind's pictorial History. Diego Velázquez, the Sevilla-born master of the Spanish Baroque period, and a secret canvas hidden in the mist of times, are the axis around which spins this enigmatic tale, narrated through the works of some of the world's greatest painting masters. Murillo, Sorolla, Picasso or Van Gogh are some of the main characters both artists summon to this singular project, allowing metaphors, shadowy and rhetorical, to brush the canvas with the nostalgic air Man's regard sometimes possesses. Mystery and a love for Painting are the main ideas in this Balzian Gallery.
They fly over this superb mosaic starring the keyboards (piano, harpsichord, organ) and the voices. As if it was a tiny art gallery, one with the size of a glance, The Canvas in the Mirror's score shows the mystical halo of the craftsman's hands over the keyboard... This is music for assembly halls, colonnades and palace rooms.
That is what David Bazo has composed using the words provided by Artha Moreton: one of the most difficult games to carry out; the one joining music and words.
To compose a melody over a set image is somewhat difficult, no doubt. But to weave together a whole story out of a fewwords allows the imagination a lot of space.
This is a consistent faculty for the genious, but a pipedream for mere mortals. Bazo is one of the most imaginative composers in the current musical landscape. His human, or divine, ability(depending on your point of view), bestowed upon a few chosen ones by Artemis and Apollo, is something so unusual one rarely sees it. To visit the Bazian Gallery to gaze at The Canvas in the Mirror means to step into an incomparable chromatic universe, which makes of this work a living example of the attractive propositions still to be undertaken.
Bazo solves the riddle inside the author's words by composing a series of leitmotifs describing minutely the different emotional states (chapters) the heroine goes through. That's why The Canvas in the Mirror is one of the composer's riskiest works, and one that will surely take up a prominent space in the Bazian Gallery.