Juan Hidalgo, Miguel Angel Coria, Gonzalo De Olavide

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Three composers, three entirely different answers to the question of what Spain's musical modernity might look like - gathered here on an RCA pressing of exemplary importance. Juan Hidalgo (1927-2018) was the co-founder of the ZAJ group, the Spanish neo-Dada collective he established in 1964 with Walter Marchetti and Ramón Barce, and whose sensibility - formed by John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and a radical reconception of what a musical event could be - placed him among the most original artistic minds of his generation anywhere in Europe. Where Marco absorbed the European avant-garde and transformed it into something theatrically spectacular, Hidalgo dissolved the boundary between music and action with a quiet intensity that had no equivalent in Spanish culture.

Miguel Angel Coria and Gonzalo De Olavide represent further strands of the same creative moment - Coria working within a rigorously structured compositional language, Olavide bringing a distinctive approach to timbre and texture that belongs to no single school. All three composed in a Spain that was still politically isolated from the mainstream European cultural conversation, and the music they made carries the particular tension of that situation: a simultaneous desire to engage with international developments and a necessity of forging a language from within. The conductor is José María Franco Gil. RCA, 17.1305/2.