Orlando Jacinto García (b.1954)
Music for Chorus and Orchestra
Toccata Classics TOCC 0239
Anjane Cecilia Girwarr (soprano)
Glenda Fernandez-Vega (mezzo)
Rohan A. Smith (speaker)
Florida International University Concert Choir
Mark Aliapoulios, conductor
Málaga Philharmonic Orchestra
José Serebrier
1 Auschwitz for Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, Speaker, Chorus and Orchestra (Nunca se olvidaran)
Rohan A. Smith		 19:52
2 Varadero Memories
Orquesta Filarmónica De Málaga		 13:21
3 In Memoriam Earle Brown
Orquesta Filarmónica De Málaga		 21:05
Born in Havana in 1954, the Miami-based Orlando Jacinto García studied with Morton Feldman and has inherited some of Feldman’s concerns: his music likewise evolves gradually over slow-moving spans of time, unfolding like the leaves of a plant, generating colours as with the gentle turning of a kaleidoscope. The elegiac Auschwitz (they will never be forgotten), a meditation for chorus and orchestra, captures something of the infinite sorrow evoked by the memory of such institutionalised cruelty. Varadero Memories is an abstract recollection of a Cuban beach where as a child he spent time with his grandparents. And the hypnotic In Memoriam Earle Brown pays elegant, understated tribute to a seminal figure in American modernism.

These pieces display a consistently original sonic imagination, and exemplify the composer's intent to explore music's capacity for existing outside time, its effect on the listener unaffected by duration or conventional progression of musical argument. To some extent this reflects his studies with Feldman, but Garcia's music is far denser harmonically, and more emotionally intense. Repeated gestures, static, highly dissonant, often cluster, chords occur frequently, but so do long-breathed statements that are best described as melodies, for want of a better term. Auschwitz begins with shattering, metallic clusters, but the main focus of the work is a timeless lament; similarly, the Memories - of a place in Cuba - exist in a place of the imagination outside of time, reinforced by repetition and with their own emotional resonance, while the relatively consonant undulating sonorities of In Memoriam suggest a static, eternal memorial to a valued colleague and friend, now present only in memory.