The professional career of Gonzalo de Olavide (1934-2005) was linked from very early days to the most avant-garde musical circles in Europe. Trained at Madrid Conservatory where he was a disciple of Victorio Echevarría, he soon transferred to Antwerp and Brussels (Belgium) to further studies with Eugène Traey and André Souris and, later in Darmstadt and Cologne (Germany), he attended classes by Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti and Berio. With these considerable credentials and solid training, Olavide reached Geneva (Switzerland) in 1966 where he settled and was to write a substantial part of his extensive musical catalogue.

This recording brings together his complete orchestral and symphonic-vocal output, almost all works written during those years in Switzerland along with some subsequent scores composed after returning to Spain in 1991. On three compact discs in a comprehensive survey running from 1964 (‘Índices’) to ‘Concertante-Divides’ (2001), as a whole, these pieces show the listener Olavide’s creative development and his particular imprint of combining avant-garde and Spanish elements, most notable in ‘Cante in Memoriam García Lorca’ or ‘Sinfonía Homenaje a Falla ‘para gran orquesta.

Performances by:
Orquesta Sinfónica y Coro de RTVE
Carole Sidney Louis, soprano
Magdalena Llamas, mezzo-soprano
José Manuel Montero, tenor
Richard Rittelmann, baritone
Jordi Casas, choir’s conductor
Arturo Tamayo, conductor

Contents:

CD Audio 1:
01. Índices, para Orquesta Ad Libitum (1964) (11:24)
02. Sine die, para Gran Orquesta (1973) (11:35)
03. Clamor II, para Electrónica y Orquesta (1975) (42:22)

CD Audio 2:
01. Sinfónica “Homenaje a Falla”, para Gran Orquesta (1976) (18:40)
02. Cante In Memoriam García Lorca, para Coro, Mezzo-Soprano y Orquesta (1979) (22:01)
03. Estigma, para Voces Solistas, Coro y Orquesta (1982) (26:33)

CD Audio 3:
01. Oda II, para Barítono y Orquesta (1985) (18:38)
02. Orbe-Variations, para Orquesta (1988) (11:59)
03. Tránsito, para Orquesta (1992) (13:09)
04. Concertante-Divides, para Mezzo-Soprano, Coro y Orquesta (2001) (16:48)

Total time: 194’03”