OCNE - Ciclo Sinfónico 7 - 2022-2023 (Programme notes by Teresa Cascudo)

"(...) The work is particularly sophisticated from the harmonic and instrumental point of view, which are surely the aspects of the score that will be most evident on first hearing. Thus, the use of extended techniques and the way in which the very varied orchestral texture materialises and dematerialises throughout the work constitute a large part of its interest. The same could be said of the subtlety with which the tempo is handled. She also explores other parameters that are sometimes more difficult to grasp, especially the work on "extended temporal extensions", passages that require a kind of instrumental virtuosity that is, so to speak, quiet, contrary to "pyrotechnics" and very difficult to achieve. Without breaks, in an organic way, Deepest Stillness leads us to "glimpses of sunrises, sunsets or nocturnal landscapes". Its ending, almost abrupt, invites us to give continuity to the resonance of eternity in our inner (...)

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DIAPASON MAGAZINE (16/05/2019, by Pierre Rigaudière).

"(...) Et puis il y a le remarquable chœur Vox Clamantis, dont le fondateur et directeur musical Jaan-Eik Tulve est loin d'être inconnu en France, où il a étudié et s'est spécialisé dans le plain-chant. Outre la consonance (des nappes encore chez Evelin Seppar, la simplicité attachante d'un quasi gospel chez Karen Tanaka, un soupçon de swing dans I heard a voice... d'Arvo Pärt), c'est aussi chez Tõnis Kaumann, l'évocation d'un idiome médiéval à base de diaphonie sur bourdon qui'appelle la plénitude de ce chœur. The communicative energy of Ring Out, Wild Bells (Jessica Meyer) energizes the concert, but it is Maria Eugenia Luc's Exaudi that peppers the harmonic tenor (...)"

 W.M.D-TALLINN-2019


OSCAR EDELSTEIN (26/10/2016, Composer and Researcher)

"There are days that with music almost everything is fixed. A few weeks ago I got this disc that I listened to several times on a Sunday black mass. Like rain or air some works seem to me destined to "forever"; they are few, but with some it happens to me. On an idea that exposes and extends over the others, she - it had to be a "she" - was weaving a series of fantastic pieces that speak to us of deeper winds, of musical reason with no other logic than beauty, which sleeps like the arguments of an orient thought but well hidden in the plot. It handles another time and a variety of light, color, timbre, space, with feminine sensibility and intimate intelligence, without showing itself to the distracted. An integral, complete work, but made of linked pieces, a woman frees us from chance with her luminous musical strands. Because chance is destiny and the air or the light a masterful play to show it. María Eugenia Luc an Argentine composer to show the world in times where darkness seems the sky."

  CCMC.2


OPERA WORLD (08/09/2016, by Andrés Sánchez Alonso)

"We find ourselves before an eminently contemplative musical discourse, thanks to which each piece draws a unique stroke, without edges: an authentic breath of air, built from beginning to end by means of a praiseworthy instrumentation and a superb management of musical time. (...) That is why "de aire y luz" has to be considered in justice as a whole compositional feat. In this cycle of works, Luc bravely opts to move away from that concept that, precisely, has governed western music par excellence: conflict (...) listening to this album is an organic and natural experience, like the very breath it evokes. Undoubtedly, it will surprise all those who, even today, are still intrigued to know how the great living composers continue to create for and for the evolution of the universe of sound".

  


MUNDO CLÁSICO (04/25/2016, by Paco Yáñez)

"Argentine by birth and citizen of the world by experience (and I believe, conviction), María Eugenia Luc (Rosario, 1958) gives us an excellent sample of the musical auras she has been alchemizing throughout her career in this new compact disc on the Orpheus label, entirely dedicated to one of her latest creations: the cycle De aire y luz (2008-15), a set of eight pieces for ensemble, saxophone quartet and orchestra through which we delve into some of the hallmarks of the Italian-Argentine composer: the transformations of light, breathing as a modulator of sound, the plasmatic fluidity of chromatic masses; all this with Zen as background, inspiration and articulation of a way of conceiving sound that builds bridges in many musical directions. .."

 


  TWELVE NOTES (04/17/2016, by Jorge Fernández Guerra).

"It takes a lifetime to deliver to a society as obdurate as the one that envelops us an act of generosity of the caliber of the one enclosed within the confines of a compact disc: that of composer María Eugenia Luc. Her gift contains nothing more and nothing less than air and light. (...) One of the enormous merits of this work is hidden in a twinning of schools of work, each of which has led a powerful musical current in recent decades, but rarely do they appear in harmony. We speak, firstly, of an atmosphere linked to Zen-like meditation; secondly, spectral thinking; and thirdly, the structural rigor of mathematical morphologies, such as fractal thinking or the golden section. To combine such disparate, often confronting, areas of recent cultural barricades, and to do so with remarkable expertise and sonic success is, no doubt, one of the signs that this album contains decades of aesthetic nourishment and correct digestion (...) A cultural piece, in short, essential".

  


RITMO MAGAZINE (02/22/2016, by Esther Martín)

"The imaginary of the Argentine composer María Eugenia Luc contains a wide palette of textures in which it is easy to fantasize with atmospheres and sensations (...) her music becomes present instantly and with the same speed the ear assimilates it (...) the sound is treated as an energy that generates music (...)!

  

THE ART OF THE FUGUE (12/12/2015, by Manuel Luca de Tena).

"(...) a brilliant musical product that sounds fundamentally European and familiar in its employment of rhythms, intervals, atmospheric and subtle timbres and other elements inherited from the spectral tradition, fractal designs - Fibonacci series, micro and macro structures - and other resources of today's music. (...) Luc, however, claims for his music a certain mental climate that runs serene and concentrated, meditative, that slides in time in a natural way, without abrupt gestures and that guides us through moods and energy flows (...) forms of musical expansion that reveal different states of inspiration, air retention, exhalation, ending in climaxes of peaceful circularity, in complex light beams. A warm atmosphere colors the musical cycle with great internal pulsation from the idea of deep luminosity of Shen to Chang (2013), the shortest and most subjective final piece conceived as the last breath prior to the fusion with silence".

  


DEIA Newspaper (12/07/2014, Asier VALLEJO UGARTE).

"HU"symphonic orchestra.

 "...the two concerts left for the Bilbao Symphony within its season have important attractions. The first (December 11 and 12), with Michal Nesterowicz conducting, presents the world premiere of the work Hu by Mª Eugenia Luc, a composer of powerful imagination and current artistic director of Ensemble Kuraia..."

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SINERIS - Musicology Journal (May/ June 2013, Juan Carlos JUSTINIANO LÓPEZ)

"SHEN"sextet.

  "...There was no lack of a more mathematical and scientific proposition with Maria Eugenia Luc's Shen, raised on a Taoist background and fractal structures in a search for sonorities close to concrete music..."

  


GARA NEWSPAPER (8/26/13, MIKEL CHAMIZO).

"YUN"saxophone quartet.

"...extraordinary exercise of delicacy that is "Yun" by María Eugenia Luc, in which the sound seemed always on the verge of breaking in its own internal breath. Magical..."

  


DIARIO VASCO (08/26/2013, TERESA ALBERO).

"YUN"saxophone quartet.

"....Yun, who started from the most ethereal and dispersed to gradually approach a definition of sound and create an interesting sound world..."

  


GARA NEWSPAPER (06/09/2012 MIKEL CHAMIZO)

"SILENCIO BLANCO"symphonic orchestra.

 "... Completely different was "Silencio blanco" by María Eugenia Luc, a dramatic, passionate work in which the experience and skill of the Argentinean in the use of the orchestra could be appreciated. Handling an infinite number of resources and instrumental colors, some of them certainly striking..."

  


SCHERZO MAGAZINE (21/11/2011 JOSE LUIS TÉLLEZ)

 "Xi", Chamber Orchestra

"...Xi, by Maria Eugenia Luc, founder of the Ensemble and today its artistic director, is a work of orientalist inspiration (Chi-Kung breathing) at the margin of all exoticism: refined game that starts from a very simple material from which it extracts a fluid and uniform development..."

  


NEWSPAPER DEIA (21/11/2006, ANTXON ZUBIKARAI)

"APOCALYPSE", Symphonic Orchestra

 "...... This work, on the Apocalypse of St. John, shows a very interesting structure as well as an intelligent and varied sound endowment along about twelve minutes of duration. As the Argentinean author herself, who lives in Bilbao, declares, "the music tries to be an evocation of the symbolic images, situations and events that are presented there (in the biblical text) as a prophecy". Therefore, his writing, which obtains the best results in the handling of a nourished instrumental formation, is not only directed towards the echoes of destruction (as it is usually the most usual treatment in the artistic interpretations of the Apocalypse) but it is impregnated with a more conceptual symbolism, with an interioristic vision that surpasses the mere effects -which are not excluded either and are even of color and consistency-. The poetic density is above mere description. A wide and solid chapter in slow tempo but full of vitality is followed by a section of more "violent" rhythm, with very strong accents, after which a slow space again, very expressive, closes the work. Perhaps the latter responds to the author's statements, when she speaks of "the suspension of time after the sixth trumpet".

There was great applause. ..."

 


GARA NEWSPAPER (15/08/2006, MIKEL CHAMIZO)

"RED", Flute in G

Just a flute

 "...It is not at all easy to review a concert like Thursday's, starring a single musician and, moreover, a flautist. ..... That is why Mario Caroli's concert was so exceptional, because it allowed the fifty or so listeners gathered there to rediscover an instrument so labeled by clichés.

..... Works like those of Kaija Saariaho and María Eugenia Luc were magnificent examples of how speech can be related to the flute, creating a curious hybrid between language and musical sounds (or noises). ....."

  


AROUND MUSIKASTE 2002

JON BAGÜÉS (MAY 2002, MUSICOLOGIST AND RESEARCHER).

"LAMIAK", Saxophone, Txalaparta, Violin, Electroacoustics, Dance and Video.

 "...Among the five works on the program, perhaps the last work by María Eugenia Luc stood out, who after having already used the txalaparta together with the txistu in her work "Enbat", Symphonic Movement for txistu, txalaparta, marimba and electroacoustic sounds, gave us the opportunity to listen again to our traditional instrument imbricated with academic instruments in a game of sound, light and movement..."

  


VASCO NEWSPAPER (20/08/2001, ISMAEL GONZÁLEZ CABRAL)

"TAN FUGAZ", Saxophone, Accordion, Percussion and Electroacoustics

Oiasso Novis

 

 ".....En Tan Fugaz by María Eugenia Luc (1958) ... we will underline the timbral richness of its staff; baritone/alto saxophone, accordion, percussion and electroacoustic sounds and the rich dialogue, a bit cold, engaged by the instrumental soloists......"


Photos

 

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Silvia Castillo, Maria Eugenia Luc and Harry Sparnaay (Vitoria-Gasteiz 2009)

 


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Awards Ceremony of the International Contest Ciutat de Tarragona 2005 (Carlos Roque Alsina, Maria Eugenia Luc, Zulema de la Cruz, Antón García Abril, Joan Guinjoan, Jean Jacques Werner; Jorge de Persia)


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Hervé N´Kauoa, Clément Fauconnet, Sylvain Millepied, Marie-Bernadette Charrier, Maria Eugenia Luc, Gabriel Erkoreka, Christophe Havel ( Leioa, 2005)


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Contest Ciutata de Tarragona (2005)