Lent comme un rêve [Slow like a Dream], composed in August 2015 and based on Jaume Plensa’s homonymous poem, emerges from the artistic world of the Catalan sculptor. Plensa unifies aesthetic form and poetry, the eternal and ephemeral, robustness and fragility like nobody else. So, when we look at one of his sculptures, it opens up an interior silence, a space of reflection… We seem to hear the organic, almost biological murmur that keeps us alive and pushes us to look beyond the limits that our fears impose upon us.

I composed this piece for chamber choir and piano after visiting Plensa’s exhibition The Silence of Thought held in Ceret in 2015. While walking through the installation Talking Continents (2013), we were plunged into a world of symbols, graphs, shadows and multi-dimensional movements that showed us how humans are also made from language, and that symbols and words are also our bodies, our home. Thus, after these whirlwinds of words that never seem to end, the choral and piano texture unfolds and folds itself again more and more, like a jellyfish in water, until reaching extremely tense and vibratory climaxes.

                                                                                                              Hèctor Parra, 2016

Date

04.02.2018 Barcelone, Catalogne
Cor de Cambra del Palau de la Música Catalana. Óscar Payá, directeur.
Petit Palau, 12:00h.