DANTE

Isabel Dombriz

Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann is a work dealing with spiritual decay and desperation, about questions with no answers. This desolation is shown musically in a descending theme opening with a chromatic semitone, symbol of plaint. With a similarly strong emotional charge, the music of Liszt’s Funérailles recalls the funereal tolling of bells, filled with grief. The bitter pain of death. No place for light. In the “lacrimoso” Liszt’s soul weeps and implores. Miguel Bustamante’s Diabolus in musica alludes to the devil with the much-feared tritone – diminished fifth or augmented fourth as the occasion requires – an interval considered sinister since the Middle Ages: a constant creation of tension, overwhelming and implacable. This interval, the tritone, leads to the opening of a work that is central to this disc: Fantasia quasi Sonata: Après une lecture du Dante, a composition taking the listener into each of the worlds recreated in the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321): Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, a journey through all the human emotions. And, as there is no shadow without light, such blackness is compensated with a vision of Paradise, filled with clarity and life; life understood as creation. Hence the inclusion of Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau, with the play of water and the world’s reflection there as inspiration; of Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan, inspired by the grandeur of the ocean and the tides with all their intensities; and Algarabía by Pedro Mariné with the wheeling of little birds at dawn, the constant flow of nature … The streams, the air, the volcano’s lava, the blood in our veins, all flow. A symbol of life, of the unceasing movement of the power of nature. Seven open doors. Seven paths for souls.» tab_2=»Isabel Dombriz has for me always represented one of the most extraordinary talents produced by the Spanish keyboard. It is possible to find in her purity of touch, brilliance, substance, refinement, dreaming, determination and above all the rapture reflected in this young artist. Hearing her means a journey into higher spiritual regions, her pianism never empty, but rather filled with personages, figures and experiences making listening unforgettable. Isabel Dombriz Martialay will undoubtedly be one of the great pianists of the future. (Aquiles Delle Vigne)