Tomás Marco

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (two slightly damaged corners)

A defining document of the Spanish avant-garde at its most theatrically inventive - and, on its original 1973 Clave pressing, one of the rarer LPs to have emerged from Spain during this period. Tomás Marco (born Madrid, 1942) had, by the early 1970s, established himself as the most publicly visible figure in Spanish new music: a composer, critic, and cultural organizer of exceptional energy, who had attended the Darmstadt summer courses and worked with Boulez, Ligeti, and Stockhausen, and who had founded the contemporary music journal Sonda in 1967, which became the principal platform for serious engagement with the European avant-garde in Spain during the Franco years.

The three works collected here - Tea Party, Mysteria, and Rosa Rosae - represent Marco at the height of his engagement with theatrical and performative modes of musical thinking, his scoring reaching into the domains of theatrical gesture, text, and spectacle with a directness that connects him as much to Mauricio Kagel or George Aperghis as to the German New Simplicity with which he was sometimes associated. Mysteria (1970-71) for chamber orchestra had premiered at Royan in April 1973, just months before this LP appeared. The conductor is José María Franco Gil, and the recording captures a phase of Spanish musical life in which the distance between the country's isolation and the post-war European mainstream was being rapidly and urgently closed - not through imitation but through an absorption so complete it produced something new. Clave, 18-5007 S, Spain, 1973.