1
The Red Book
ANONYMOUS
(14th Century)
The Red Book of Montserrat contains a unique collection of pilgrim songs and dances from the early 14th century that combines the traditions of cultivated and popular music of the era. Some pieces are prayers that encompass the mysterious charm of an otherworldly longing; the best, “Imperaytritz de la ciutat joiosa,” is a love song set in a fairytale landscape, a magical miniature, where desire exults in the infinitude of its demand. It is the pure jewel of a spring that always flows.
2
Recercadas from the Trattado de Glosas
Diego Ortiz
(1553)
The Recercadas are a prodigy of melancholic grace, subtle harmony, and intelligence, but they are not an oasis. Diego Ortiz, along with Narváez, Mudarra, Lluís Milà, Cabezón, and a few others, illustrates the very high level of instrumental music in the Hispanic Renaissance. However, in the Recercadas there is more than the quintessential exponent of a great tradition. There is the tremor of presentiment subjected to the order of exquisite, wise, and ductile form, and within it the splendor of an art on a human scale.
3
Membra Jesu Nostri
Dietrich Buxtehude
(1680)
It has been said that the Dane Buxtehude is Bach's main predecessor. This cycle of seven short cantatas, almost in the form of an oratorio, proves it. Each cantata alludes to the suffering of a member of Jesus Christ's body in the Passion, and the whole, of superb coherence, strikingly contained and transparent, is an exercise in painful meditation that transmutes empathy into introspection, uncertainty into prayer, with the hope of finally contemplating the beloved members beyond the shadows, face to face.
4
The Passion According to Saint Matthew
Johann Sebastian Bach
(1727)
If for many Bach is the very center of music, The Passion is the pinnacle of his art and, perhaps, the highest creative achievement of the human spirit, where the creature addresses its creator with full voice. Among so many incomparable moments, the arias “Erbarme dich, mein Gott” and “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” express the searing experience of anguish and the first glimpses of comfort that soothe as never before. Cioran said: “Bach is the only thing that makes you think the universe is not a failure.” God can be satisfied.
5
Concertos for Harpsichord and Strings
Johann Sebastian Bach
(1730)
Bach's concertos for keyboard and strings are among the most graceful and suggestive instrumental compositions he ever composed. Bach is tireless and constantly introduces embellishments that make the dialogue between the instruments more expressive. He leaves us captivated by surprises such as the adagio of the concerto for keyboard, flute, and strings which, in Rampal's old and beautiful version, evokes the lunar landscape of an enigmatic and secret fable, or the concerted wonder of the adagio for two keyboards and strings in C minor, of an ethereal delicacy
6
Piano Concerto No. 1. Op. 12
Ludwig van Beethoven
(1795-1801)
Beethoven's music did not immediately win the admiration of the public. Echoes of that audacity still surprise us when listening to the movement that opens the first piano concerto, with that torrent of themes linked with a boldness hitherto unheard of, leading to one of the most poignant largos in music history. In the profound connection between piano and orchestra, Mozart's art expands and dominates its century. The hypersensitive pianist and the incomparable sound architect dazzle us. Always arrogant and free, the romantic self imposes itself on the universe.
7
Nocturnes
Fryderyck Chopin
(1830-1849)
Romantic sensibility is nocturnal. It loves the recondite, the shadowy, and the secret to auscultate itself while hearing in the background the basso continuo of the world's enigma. But it can also be gentle like a whispered dance in Chopin's second and third nocturnes or in Schumann's Träumerei: light, very brief daydreams that briefly traverse the territory of miracle and vanish. In many other nocturnes (the poignant seventh, or the thirteenth), calm and storm dispute the artist's soul, as in the poems of Hölderlin and Keats.
8
Third Symphony
Gustav Mahler
(1893-1896)
Mahler is an inexhaustible composer. He carried forward everything that the culminating moments of Brahms and Bruckner foreshadowed, and he himself presaged the rupture of Schönberg and Berg. Perhaps the Third Symphony is the most inexhaustible and rich of his works. An immoderate, Nietzschean hymn to nature, mystery, and hope; a hieroglyph; a sum of ancient discoveries and new experiments. George Steiner wrote that the chant emerging from the night of the Third carries us to a home we have never inhabited and which is now ours.
9
Gymnopédies; Gnossiennes
Erik Satie
(1888 and 1890)
The strange magnetization that this handful of brief pieces gives off, their enveloping evocative force, has led to their abuse, even as a soundtrack for the most banal advertisements. Not even this has managed to dispel the veil of mystery they exude. With the most secret pieces by Debussy and Ravel, they intone the swan song of the twilight neo-romanticism of the fin de siècle. The communicating vessels of mystery are the playing field of genius. The aroma of Satie's third gnossienne still intoxicates us; the light of the fifth flirts with the horizon with traces of Giorgione.
10
String Quartets
Dimitri Shostakovich
(1938-1974)
The Russian composer began composing string quartets relatively late, in 1938, on the eve of the great Stalinist purges. The quartets were a discreet refuge where he could continue his musical explorations. He never abandoned this form of condensed tension. He experimented with entire ideas and movements that he would later incorporate into his "major" works, a very dense, lucid, and incandescent musical world. Now they allow us to approach the exuberant art of the mistreated Russian genius in what was most intimate and his own, where he allowed himself the freedom that was so difficult for him. I woke up, she, so beautiful, was still there.