Sol y Tierra – Bruno Giner

Description

Sol y Tierra – Bruno Giner

For cello solo.

Score available in hard copy or for download.

Audio excerpt

The subtext of this work is the meeting of two itineraries of exile following the Spanish Civil War: the Catalan cellist Pau Casals and my grandfather, the Valencian painter Balbino Giner García. They met in the early 1950s during their exile in the Roussillon region. In a very friendly manner, Casals asked my grandfather to pictorially “chronicle” the first Prades Festival (June 1950) that was about to take place. The result was a series of 150 portraits, of Casals of course, but also of most of the musicians who took part in this first edition.

Casals masterfully opened this first festival on June 2, 1950 in the Eglise Saint Pierre de Prades, performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suite no. 1 in G major (sol majeur). However, by polysemy, sol can mean earth in French, but also sun in Spanish. So I contracted both meanings: Sol y Tierra. The dream of a lost land, then the adoptive dream of exile. Polysemy also works in both languages: Spanish = Sol y Tierra; French = solitaire (Sol y Terre).

Musically – the symbolism is clear enough – Sol y Tierra exposes a long melody, broken in several places but capable of rebirth after each break, until it finally blossoms and climbs to the instrument’s heights, again and again.

This symbolic and polysemous play is also found in the “coding” of certain notes in the score. Indeed, the work begins with a Sol (G) (the sunny key of Bach’s Suite no. 1), but it’s also the initial of my grandfather’s surname (G for Giner in Anglo-Saxon notation = G) and thus of my own at the same time. A few insistent low Do (Cs) and the variegated part in the C zone correspond to Casals’ C (C = do in Anglo-Saxon notation). As a final coquetry, the piece ends on a Bb (the initial of my first name – B – in Anglo-Saxon notation, but also that of my grandfather’s first name), one way of assuming this heritage of exile, both familial and musical.

The story of the meeting between Pau Casals and Balbino Giner García was the subject of a short story entitled Le crin et le fusain, written in 2012, published by Istesso Tempo and available from François Dhalmann.

Bruno Giner