Tomás Gueglio: Duermevela

The debut portrait album from Tomás Gueglio, Duermevela represents the artistic qualities of Chicago and Buenos Aires, which are both hometowns for Gueglio, where his unique approach to chamber music intrigues us immediately.

Mil Panaderos starts the listen with solo violin from Austin Wulliman, where the artist mesmerizes us with bare, effective flashes of string acrobatics, and Apostillas a Mil Panaderos follows with cello, violin, piano, percussion, soprano sax and clarinet from Latitude 49, who use each instrument sparingly but with much impact.

At the midpoint, After L’Addio/Felt: After L/Addio recruits Ben Melsky’s stunning harp prowess on the finger dragging technique that often twinkles with a dreamy quality, which continues to After L’Addio/Felt: Felt, where a calmer approach unfolds amid the introspective song craft.

The final track, Canción en Duermevela, exits the listen with 4 movements, where a guitar quartet utilize plucking, tapping and scraping gestures that align with rhythm, intimacy and melody, which arrives at a very unpredictable place.

A very precisely layered effort where tone, timbre and technique are all tweaked, manipulated and illuminated in Gueglio’s inimitable vision, you’ve probably never heard a chamber record quite like this one, and that’s a big part of the charm here.

— Tom Haugen, 1.28.2021

The Argentine-American composer is represented here by a collection of recent chamber works, exploring crystalline textures and unfamiliar timbres. Mil Panaderos and its companion piece, Apostillas a Mil Panaderos (marginal notes on Mil Panderos) sums up much of what the composer is about; Mil Panaderos is a bravura exercise in harmonics and different types of articulation, for solo violin, while Apostillas a Mil Panaderos is a transcription of the work for sextet, the instruments played more conventionally yet saturating the colors and filling in the etched lines of the violin piece and producing a subtle timbral counterpoint that the violin could only suggest. Un oiseau divides similar material (including vocal effects) between two bass flutes played in diverging rhythms, leading to a playful heterophonic texture. After L'Addio / Felt's two contrasting tableaux each explore a specific harp technique. The first movement focuses on the idea of glissandi, varying the pressure between hands and strings and by performing with knuckles, nails, fingertips, and palm, while the second movement focuses on the performance of harmonics. What is surprising in this technical tour de force is the dramatic scena that emerges, the first part vigorous and active, the second serene, resonant and glowing. The guitar quartet Canción en Duermevela (combining the words ‘asleep' and 'awake') is in four movements, connected through a kind of cantus firmus distributed between the players, harmonized in chromatic clusters, and accompanied by timbres produced by extended techniques and microtonal clashes.

— n/a, 9.15.2020

Although the booklet notes with this release are minimal, a trip to the composer’s website reveals not only biography and background but links to the full scores themselves, something invalu- able and all too often prohibited (financially, that is) in the normal run of things. The QR code on the inside front cover neatly takes you to the disc’s page on the composer’s website. An Argentine in Chicago, Tomás Gueglio lectures at Northwestern University and is Manager and Artistic Consultant of the Ensemble Dal Niente.

A violinist in the JACK Quartet, Austin Wulliman will be saturated in new music. So it is hardly surprising that he excels in Gueglio’s Míl Panaderos, a work for solo violin written in 2013 and re- vised in 2017 especially for this recording. Described as a “study for solo violin exploring limited amounts of material in a rather systematic way,” the piece is of variable duration with a suggestion of around six and a half minutes; here, it is 7:21. Following the score confirms the accuracy of Wulliman’s performance, while the otherworldliness of his flautando just resonates on. The dynamic range is calibrated so that sounds that are intended to hover in inaudibility really do so; and yet we hear every little sound of the bow against the strings, and register the not infrequent outbursts and crescendos to fortissimo.

This first piece actually forms something of a template for Apostillas a Míl Panaderos (“apostillas” means “addendum” in Spanish). But moving the work from solo violin to a sextet comprising soprano sax, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello (expressly for the present group, Latitude 49) meant changing the character substantially. As “orchestrations” go it is somewhat miraculous. The ability for notes to sustain in a way unavailable to the violin creates a softer, more phantasmagoric soundscape (the way the a percussion tap coinciding with the highest note of a glissando can then enable the highest note to resonate on, for example). The care that clearly went into this performance is similarly impressive, an object lesson in how careful listening plus knowledge of the score by the performers can bring a piece to vibrant life. One might wish to describe this piece as a sort of “Modernist Impressionism” in that, despite the clearly disjunct gestures and pointillism, there remains a sense of an Impressionist wash of color. The sheer beauty of the harmonies at times, too, is truly touching. It would be untrue to suggest that there was a direct analogy here to, say, an orchestration of a Bach solo violin partita, but nevertheless the idea of taking a solo piece and taking what is there to a new field of possibility via an ensemble setting is exactly what has happened here.

Written for two bass flutes, 1901: Un Oiseau begins heterophonically before expanding to include a barrage of Modernist techniques. The two flutes diverge until a brief drone leads to a coda. With its plethora of vocal effects (some of them avian), the piece certainly sounds as if it is scored for more than just the two musicians, and the close recording enables every key click to register. The two artists that comprise the duo Mei Música Para Flautas, Juliana Moreno and Patricia García, are consistently excellent; I find it hard to believe this was in one take, so one has to acknowledge the producer and editor, too. The technical explorations of After L’Addio/Felt for solo harp are a little more focused: the first panel exploring glissando, the second harmonics. The first is marked Freely, with intensity, and the splendid Ben Melsky manages to honor both aspects stunningly. The second piece, “Felt,” indeed indicates a felt pick and is marked flotate, freely and “pppp to pp sempre.” Sonically, it is gorgeous, at times even implying (to my ears) a Balinese steel pan.

A melody acing as a cantus firmus connects the four movements of Canción en Duermevela for guitar quartet. The trajectory of the piece is from the chordally filled out opening upwards through to a “suspended, landscape-type ending.” Commissioned by the Centro do Experimentación del Teatro Colón for the Festival Antidiáspora, this 2016 work boasts a score notated in tablature, so that only fingering is provided. All four guitars are tuned CJ-FT-CT-GJ-BJ-EI. Indeed, in the first movement there is something of a slow processional in the opening laying out of the cantus firmus, a procession that is decorated by myriad effects. Notating a lunga pausa between movements integrates the intention to let the music of one movement sink in before the next. The second is a vast plain (completely contradicting its duration of less than two minutes) of beautiful sonority, occasionally interrupted by more adamant gestures before the more overtly resonant third section leads to the “high plateau” of the final movement, that “suspended, landscape-type ending” to which the composer refers. In a sense, this piece could only be placed at the end; it seems to head off into the heavens.

The title of the disc is Duermevela, a word that itself combines two words: “dormir” (sleep) and “velar” (to stay awake). Whether Canción en Duermevela’s final ascent is meant to convey a rising up to Heaven or a new type of heightened wakefulness is presumably deliberately ambiguous (some might contend they are one and the same, of course). Recordings from New Focus are coming across these days as uniformly excellent and stimulating; this one is no exception. Tomás Gueglio has a fine, individual voice and is fervently championed by the musicians here.

— Colin Clarke, 11.15.2020

A collection of instrumental, experimental pieces that focus on that space between awake and asleep make a sonic impressionistic riff on how those feels must sound when you are traversing both worlds. Surreal soundscapes worthy of Zappa’s experimental moods, these pieces in various combinations are ear openers for the true egghead.

— Chris Spector, 9.04.2020

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/30372

— Dave Lake, 12.28.2021