Benet Casablancas i Domingo

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Benet Casablancas i Domingo (born April 2, 1956 in Sabadell ) is a Catalan composer , musicologist and music teacher . Casablancas has been academic director of the Conservatori del Liceu in Barcelona since 2002 . Following the musical avant-garde of the 20th century, he composed works such as Sis escenes de Hamlet (1989, Six Scenes from Hamlet), La Petita música nocturna (1992, Die kleine Nachtmusik) or the Tres epigrames per a orquestra (2001, three epigrams for Orchestra).

life and work

From 1973 to 1980 Benet Casablancas studied with Josep Soler and Antoni Ros i Marbà at the City Conservatory of Music in Barcelona . At the same time he studied philosophy at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and obtained a licentiate in this subject in 1982. In 2000 he received his PhD in musicology from the same university with a thesis on music analysis. With a scholarship from the Fundació Congrés de Cultura Catalana , he studied from 1982 to 1983 with Friedrich Cerha and Karl Heinz Füssl in Vienna, among others .

Casablancas has worked with renowned national and international soloists, ensembles and orchestras. The Orquestra de Cambra del Teatre Lliure , the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya , the Orquesta Nacional de España , the BBC Symphony Orchestra , the London Philharmonic Orchestra , the London Sinfonietta , the Trio de Barcelona , the Kandinsky String Trio or the are mentioned here Pianists Josep Colom , Jordi Masó , Miquel Villalba and Ananda Sukarlan .

Casablancas has always been interested in establishing connections between music and other artistic languages ​​such as poetry and literature on the one hand and painting and visual arts on the other. With regard to literature and poetry, the settings of the text D'Humanal Fragment by Josep-Ramón Bach for mezzo-soprano and string quartet or The Lake by Edgar Allan Poe , symphonically set for alto voice and orchestra, must be mentioned. The retable sobre Textos de Paul Klee for soprano, mezzo-soprano and piano as well as Hamlet's Seven Scenes for narrator and orchestra are the composer's most widely interpreted works. The Shakespeare pieces, especially Der Sturm, inspired the work The Dark Backward of Time for large symphony orchestras. In his Drei Haikus for piano and in the Haiku for violin, cello and piano Casablancas dealt with the Japanese poem form of the haiku . These works were premiered in 2009 during Casablanca's concert tour in Japan. Musical work references with regard to the visual arts can be found, for example, in the Impromptu for orchestra Alter Klang (also Casablanca's title) based on Paul Klee 's rhythmic structure of squares and rectangles of the same name, or in the Four Darks in Red , the well-known dark color palette of black and brown and red by Russian-American artist Mark Rothko . In February 2019, Casablanca's first opera L'enigma di Lea (The Secret of Lea) was premiered at the Gran Teatre del Liceu , based on an idea and texts by Rafael Argullol .

Casablancas has commissioned works for the Orquestra de Cambra Teatre Lliure , the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya , the Orquesta Nacional de España , the Miller Theater at Columbia University in New York, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra , the Festival de Músiques de Torroella de Montgrí and others. In recent years his works have been performed in such prominent places as the House of the Wiener Musikverein or the Barbican Hall in London. Interpretations of Casablanca's works on phonograms have appeared on the labels Naxos , Columna Música , Stradivarius , Fundació Música Contemporània / Emec and Anemos .

Casablanca's compositional work testifies to a comprehensive knowledge of music, as well as art and literary history, especially that of the 20th century. Casablancas used or used this knowledge critically for his own work. At the beginning of his composing career, influences of serial music and counterpoint predominated . In his later phases he developed a clear, harmonious tonal language in which an interest in musical structure and an interest in intense expressiveness go hand in hand.

In addition to his compositional work, Casablancas works as a teacher and essayist. He advised the Fundació la Caixa (Foundation of the Catalan Savings Banks Association), the Gran Teatre del Liceu and the music lexicon The New Grove, among others, with regard to music projects . He has taught at the Badalona Conservatories, the Escola de Música de Barcelona and the Universitat d'Alcalá de Henares in Madrid. He was also the educational director of the Jove Orquestra Nacional de Catalunya , the Catalan youth orchestra. Since 2002 he has worked alongside the General Director Maria Serrat as Academic Director of the Conservatori del Liceu . He published numerous music articles in specialist journals such as L'Avenç , Recerca Musicològica , Quodlibet and Arietta . In 2000 he wrote the essay Humor in Music for the Journal of the Beethoven Society of Europe . Joke, parody and irony. (Reichenberger, Berlín, 2000) and the work La música catalana i les avantguardes europees (1916–1938) (1999, The Catalan music and the European avant-garde (1916–1938)).

Casablancas has received numerous awards, including the Ferran Sor Prize of the Generalitat de Catalunya in 1984, the New York II Musician's Accord in 1986 , the XVI International Òscar Esplà Music Prize in 1988 , the Premi Nacional del Disc in the same year , the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona (music prize of the City of Barcelona), the Composer's Arena in Amsterdam in 1996 , the Premi Nacional de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya (National Culture Prize of the Catalan Government) in 2007 and the Premio Nacional de música del Ministeri de Cultura espanyol (National Spanish Music Prize, Music Prize of the Spanish Ministry of Culture) in 2013 .

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ This article has included passages from the article of the same name on the Catalan-language Wikipedia. These passages are marked accordingly.
  2. ↑ Benet Casablancas i Domingo. In: Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana.
  3. ↑ a b c d section after: Benet Casablancas i Domingo. In: Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana.
  4. ↑ a b c section after the article of the same name on the Catalan-language Wikipedia. Detailed information is shown in this article.
personal data
SURNAME Casablancas i Domingo, Benet
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Catalan composer, musicologist and music teacher
DATE OF BIRTH April 2, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Sabadell