Gabriel Erkoreka, born in Bilbao in 1969, studied composition and piano at the J. C. de Arriaga Superior Conservatoire and later pursued postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Performer Biography
Alfonso Gómez, the Spanish-German pianist on this album, is known for his interpretations of 20th and 21st-century piano music and has won 11 national and international prizes.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Gabriel Erkoreka's music is characterized by a paradox: a search for the objective and enumerable, combined with a conscious embrace of chaos, human subjectivity, and intuition.
Composition History
Gabriel Erkoreka, a skilled pianist himself, has an extensive catalogue of solo piano works, with a significant gap of eight years before the Four Ballades, which were premiered by Alfonso Gómez.
Compositional Technique
The Four Ballades, Erkoreka's magnum opus for piano, pay tribute to 20th-century avant-garde composers Pierre Boulez, Edgar Varèse, Olivier Messiaen, and Gérard Grisey, using their materials to create a dialectic with their music.
Recording & Production
This album was recorded in September 2021 at the Wolfgang-Hoffmann-Saal in Freiburg, Germany, with Johannes Philipp Müller as the engineer and editor.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Erkoreka's music reflects interests in nature, traditional and folk music as a pretext for experimentation, and the exploration of the mind to alter the perception of musical time.
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