Abraham Gómez — Astro Errante for Reed Quintet (2021) [Score-Video]

Abraham Gómez - Astro Errante
For Oboe, Soprano Saxophone, Clarinet, Bass Clarinet and Bassoon (2021)
Winning piece of the 2021 Calefax Composers Competition

Performed by Calefex Reed Quintet
Oliver Boekhoorn, oboe
Bart de Kater, clarinet
Raaf Hekkema, saxophone
Jelte Althuis, bass clarinet
Alban Wesly, bassoon

Recorded 22 June 2023, Haarlem, The Netherlands
Recording engineer: Oliver Boekhoorn

Program Note: Astro Errante is a work inspired by the painting of the same name by Remedios Varo, a surrealist Spanish painter who was adopted in Mexico during the Second World War.

The painting has a lot of symbolic charge, in a way it reminds of Summer Music by Samuel Barber and the dreamlike sense where Barber and Remedios Varo are related. The reed quintet ensemble has this warm and dreamlike sense with the mix of all the timbres. Words such as mystery, energetic, nostalgic, changing and surprising are some of the adjectives that accompany Astro Errante.

The idea is to capture the painting with this anthropomorphic being that
wanders through space, where its meaning is the transcendence of the idea that maintains its same essence.

The structure of the work is divided into two parts, one slow and the other
fast, which uses scales of limited transposition modes as melodic structure and specific intervals as harmonic structure.
—Abraham Gómez

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