Libres en el sonido is a portrait of Graciela Paraskevaídis, the Argentine composer who lived and worked in Uruguay, played by the Freiburg Ensemble Aventure. Seven chamber works written between 1984 and 2013 are heard, four of them in first recordings. It is a rare chance to hear a body of Latin American music that stayed largely outside the European catalogue.
Paraskevaídis was born in Buenos Aires on 1 April 1940, of Greek ancestry, and died in Montevideo on 21 February 2017. She studied composition at the National Conservatory in Buenos Aires and at the Instituto Di Tella, where she met Iannis Xenakis, and later worked with Wolfgang Fortner in Freiburg. She was a musicologist as well as a composer. Ensemble Aventure, founded in 1986, has a long commitment to contemporary music from Latin America and kept close ties of artistic friendship with her for many years. The disc is a coproduction with Deutschlandradio, made with the support of the Fundación Música AntiquaNova.
The title work, libres en el sonido presos en el sonido (1997), for flute, clarinet, piano, violin and cello, opens the disc at about ten minutes. ¿Y si fuera cierto? (2003) brings together alto flute, cor anglais and piano, and sin ir más lejos (2013), the most recent piece, sets alto flute against piano and percussion. Two solos stand at the centre: un lado, otro lado (1984) for piano and … il remoto silenzio (2002) for cello, each just over nine minutes. tris (2006) for oboe, bassoon and double bass lasts barely two minutes, and sendas (1992), in four parts for winds, brass and piano, closes the programme.
Schott describes a personal language, formed by what she learned in Europe and by idioms of her home region, that responds to concrete social issues. Its sounds are reduced to the essential and surrounded by silence, rough and yet cheerful in their own way. Yvonne Petitpierre heard it as "piercing, song-like, aggressive, dance-like", and wrote that colleagues across Latin America saw the composer as a beacon during the years of Uruguay's dictatorship. In May 2017, a few months after her death, documenta 14 dedicated a concert in her memory at the Athens Concert Hall, with libres en el sonido on the programme. The disc was reviewed in Tempo.
CD, Wergo WER 7362 2, released in 2018, in Wergo's series of Ensemble Aventure recordings.
