Croma

The Chamber Cycle of Auditorio de Tenerife presents the concert Croma by the pianist Ainoa Padrón.

Croma

Croma, Chroma, from the Greek colour.

This concert's programme features exceptional chromaticism. Works for piano in an unexpected combination: Óscar Esplá, Olivier Messiaen, and Manuel Bonnín, composers who seemingly are not related but who share an exuberant sound full of harmonic subtleties and unlikely melodies.

The Spanish Sonata by Óscar Esplá (from Levante) opens the concert with a nod to romanticism. This piece, from 1949 and dedicated to the memory of Chopin, combines a certain sense of chromaticism that is sometimes subtle and often amusing – almost brazen – with a unique intimacy in which references to the mazurka have a clearly French influence.

This brings us to the chromaticism of the pieces by Olivier Messiaen, a selection from the "Twenty Visions of the Infant Jesus" suite, from 1944. All of the tones previously proposed by Esplá are collected here vertically; Messiaen plays with them and prolongs them in time, emboldening the air with each chord.

Finally, a piece that brings together Esplá's introversion and the breadth of Messiaen is the Piano Sonata in E Minor by the composer from Tenerife, Manuel Bonnín.

This is a piece from 1930 in a tremendously polyphonic language, complex in terms of the interweaving of each line but always honest in its development; a piece in which there are no superfluous notes and each and every one of them is part of the orchestral and dazzling vision for the piano.

The three composers were related to one another because of their brave handling of sound, with a drive forchromaticism and intensity.