MUERTE SIN FIN

 

The musical poetics of the Madrid composer Mauricio Sotelo have often dipped into the vibrant world of cante jondo, always from the perspective of what the author calls micro-qualities of sound. Sotelo’s powerful, unmistakable language, whose unprecedented sound also has a certain ancient taste, is known today in Europe as Spectral Flamenco. Great flamenco artists have collaborated on his works, including Enrique Morente, Carmen Linares, Esperanza Fernández, Marina Heredia, Eva Duran, Pitingo, Rafael de Utrera, Miguel Poveda and Arcángel (the latter on almost all his works for over ten years), as well as the great guitarist Cañizares and the Granada dancer Fuensanta La Moneta.

His latest composition, Muerte sin fin, closed the third edition of the Flamenco Biennial in Holland and is now being presented in Spain as part of the Suma Flamenca.

The title of the work is inspired by the homonymous poem by the Mexican writer José Gorostiza. Fragments of that poem are interwoven with songs in the purest flamenco tradition. We could talk here, according to Sotelo’s thinking, of an architecture of the memory made up of twelve parts thast include the echoes and resonances of an ancient voice of pain that shapes the drama of the figure of the dancer. The voice is Arcangel’s and the dance, that of Fuensanta “La Moneta” and the guitar is Caízares’. The dancer’s work takes in various techniques and, of course, many other flamenco styles such as soleá, soleá por bulería, bulería or trilla.
The work projects, in a great architecture, the dramatic tension that we can hear in the small forms of flamenco.

Mauricio Sotelo was closing the pages of this composition last December, when the death took place of the great singer Enrique Morente. For this reason the score carried the epigraph:

In memory of the great Enrique Morente