Alberto Posadas

Poética del Laberinto (Poetics of the Labyrinth) is a cycle for saxophone quartet by the Spanish composer Alberto Posadas, written in 2016/17 and devoted to three iconic labyrinths from antiquity to the present. It is also the record of a long collaboration between composer and performers, who invented new techniques together to reach sounds a saxophone had never made before. These are the first recordings.

Posadas was born in 1967 in Valladolid. His music explores links between nature, mathematics and music; he has been composer in residence at IRCAM, was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2016/17, and received Spain's Premio Nacional de Música in 2011. The cycle is played by Sigma Project, the Madrid-based quartet of Andrés Gomis, Ángel Soria, Alberto Chaves and Josetxo Silguero, who between them play soprano, alto, tenor and baritone. The recording was made in February and March 2018 in Burgos.

The three pieces are Knossos, Klimmen en dalen and Senderos que se bifurcan, lasting about 20, 22 and 13 minutes. Unlike his usual way of working, Posadas frames them with freely determined paths of reminiscence. The instrumental sound also evolves across the cycle, from the uniformity of four soprano saxophones, through four distinct registers, to the dominance of the bass register at the end. The third piece takes its title and its idea from Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths and its layered timelines. Here the labyrinth is temporal rather than spatial, with each instrument keeping its own tempo. Some labyrinths have a single path and one exit, others offer many routes, and the cycle moves between both kinds.

Sigma Project gave the first performance of the cycle at El Colegio Nacional in Mexico City in 2017. The violinist Irvine Arditti was in the audience and wrote, as quoted by the label: "I thought this sort of precision could only come from a string quartet." Coming from a string player, the comparison describes well what the disc offers: four saxophones treated as a single, finely tuned instrument.

CD, Wergo WER 7390 2, released in 2020, first recordings, total time 55'11".