Granadino poet and playwright Federico García Lorca wrote the poems published as Sonetos del amor oscuro in the last years before his assassination. They are heartrending pieces, bursting with love, eroticism, and the keen sorrow that seemed to undercut every aspect of Lorca‘s life, according to friends and acquaintances like poet Vicente Aleixandre, who once wrote of Lorca that “su corazón no era ciertamente alegre”: his heart was certainly not joyful. Indeed, many of Lorca’s struggles are well documented: the high-stakes sociopolitical stigma of his homosexuality, his socialist views in an era of rising right-wing Spanish nationalism, and his depression.
Despite and because of these external and internal obstacles, Lorca’s work conveys some of the most captivating emotional verses of any 20th-century poetry. It only makes sense that, almost 90 years after Lorca’s death, but with many similar oppressive forces returning to power on a global scale, Sonetos continues to garner interest from artists of many modes.
Most recent among these is a quartet made up of musicians Helena Casella (vocals), Myrddin De Cauter (guitar), Stijn Kuppens (cello), and Stefan Bracaval (flute) performing as Sonetos del Amor Oscuro. For their debut album Vol. 1: El Sueño Se Deshizo Para Siempre, they adapt seven Lorca works into six artful tracks that interpret not only the words but the spirit of Lorca’s final works to poignant effect.
Structurally, the music of Vol. 1 is something like chamber music, intricate lines performed within an intimate ensemble. The work is not particularly beholden to genre, though; each player brings a distinct individual background to the group. Casella’s vocal approach has shades of jazz and early popular samba, giving her an effective range that spans from melancholy ease to dramatic tension.
De Cauter is a second-generation musician and a flamenco expert; he holds nothing back in providing some of the most identifiable Andalusian textures–nimble guitar and the occasional sharp hit of body percussion–to scaffold the words of the most well-regarded Andalusian poets. Kuppens and Bracaval have similarly improvisatory leanings, though Kuppens’ work emerges from foundations built mainly in the Western art-music world, and Bracaval’s from foundations in jazz.
When the four come together, they spark some truly exciting moments. “El Poeta Dice La Verdad” is particularly packed, with Kuppens and Bracaval fluttering around some of De Cauter’s brightest work one moment and switching into a more urgent and dissonant mode the next. These moments of exploration, along with Casella’s often light and always soulful singing style, keep Vol. 1 sounding contemporary.
Casella is especially powerful at the end of “Soneto De La Dulce Queja”, when she belts atop flute-borne shrieks and furious strings at increasing speed until the entire group are in a wordless frenzy. The album ends with the wistful “Pajarita de Papel”, a relatively upbeat track. The shortest and sparsest piece on the album (just after an intense three-song medley), it features Casella at the forefront throughout as the group floats away from this first volume.
To read Lorca, as to read any poet in depth, is a deeply personal act. Setting his texts to music is an artistic act of literary interpretation; there is no definitive way to do what Sonetos del Amor Oscuro is doing here. Even so, it’s easy to hear the care and feeling with which these four musicians work together to give new aural dimensions to Lorca’s work. This is strikingly good work from a fascinating assortment of musicians, and it’s exciting to know that there is likely more to come.