Title: Iberia
Type: Sound
Year: 2008 - 2009
Genre: Orchestra
Instruments: 2.2.2.2_4.2.2.1_4per_12.10.8.6.4
Duration: 15m
Commission: National Auditorium / Spain
Premiere: 4 March 2009
Location: National Auditorium / Madrid
Performer: Orquesta Excelentia
Conductor: Nacho de Paz
Title: Orquesta Excelentia
Exhibition: Group
Date: 4 March 2009
Location: National Auditorium. Madrid
The work was commissioned by the National Auditorium to commemorate its XXth anniversary and was premiered in 2009 at a concert dedicated to uniting the ties between Spain and Hispanic America. About Roberto López and due to this commission, the composer, teacher and director of the National Auditorium José Manuel López López, in an interview with the Excelentia - The World Leading Music magazine said: "... his music interested me immediately, his ideas are far from the clichés, where the expression and emotion of the gesture, the micro articulation and treatment of the texture and timbre are innovative and personal ..."
The piece takes its title from one of the most important works of Isaac Albéniz, Suite Iberia, and this it does Roberto López to confront two sociocultural contexts, Spain at the beginning twentieth century and the beginning twenty-first century, as a metaphor of past wrongs front of the historical memory of present. To do this, he uses ideas and elements of traditional culture of flamenco, as Isaac Albéniz did in his time, and he mixes these elements with his most incisive language to make them unrecognizable, and then convert them into a kind of mechanism of destruction, a kind of tragic memories of our past darker and convulsive.
At the premiere of Iberia, Roberto López said: "The sound produced by the taconeo symbolizes a battlefield, the siseo sound is the fear of being discovered, and the jaleo is the hope and reencounter. This is a highly dramatic work but hopeful that confronts us with our memory"
