Intriguingly complex and moving: the music of Orlando Jacinto García

The prolific Cuban American composer Orlando Jacinto García recorded three of his string quartets with the invaluable Amernet Quartet for METIER. The CD came to my attention as a result of his having recently received a well-deserved GRAMMY nomination. See entire review here

A recent review of my latest album appeared in Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review where the reviewer stated “If you live with this music for awhile like I have you may well find it a special thing, serious and expressive, thoughtful and in its own way a step ahead. It is sincere, intimate and a musical world unto itself, happily. Recommended” The entire review can be found here

A recent review in Arcana quoted “More approachable and immediate as Garcia’s idiom has become, there is never any sense of his music courting easy appeal or popular acclaim. Rather, these quartets maintain a steady and methodical course akin to a thawing out or loosening up of emotions audible from the outset.” The entire review can be found here

My latest album was reviewed in the Rehearsal Studio by Stephen Smoliar. The reviewer did a very good job of describing the works and my aesthetic concerns citing the fact that listening to these pieces was “a listening experience that can be likened to viewing the music through a microscope.” The entire review is available here

The performance of my work oscurecimiento gradual by pianist Larry Axelrod as part of the New Music Chicago Festival concerts held on October 10 received a nice mention in Chicago Classical Review. The review by John von Rhein excerpted below can be found here.

“A different sort of musical progression—in this case, a slow evolution from light to darkly decaying sounds—forms the expressive parameters of Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s haunting piano piece Oscurecimiento gradual. The work’s eight minutes posit a kind of spectral fluidity from the interplay of timbres, textures and tempos”.

“Multiple Voices” brought a new clarinet timbre but led the audience even deeper into a meditative and fully concentrated state of attention of each tone. With the high focus on the execution of every multiphonic in the piece, clarinetist Jesse Gilday conveyed an excellent command over the many notes of FIU composer-in-residence Orlando Garcia’s collage. In a hall full of incidental sounds and quiet noise, every tone had a sense of exclusiveness. The full review can be found here

Reviewer John Kurokawa reviewed Orchestral Music Volume 2 as part of the College Music Society’s Symposium Journal published in October 2019. To read the review visit the link here

INSPICIO an online magazine about the arts in South Florida published by The College of Communication, Architecture, and the Arts featured me and my work in the latest issue. More here

Newspaper “Málaga Hoy” published an article about “Orchestral Music #2” with Orquesta Filarmónica de Málaga, Jennifer Choi, Cristina Valdés, and Fernando Dominguez. Read full article by visiting the link below:

https://www.malagahoy.es/ocio/OFM-lanza-Orlando-Jacinto-Garcia_0_1234076619.html

I’m pretty familar with electronic/electroacoustic albums that demand to be “played at maximum volume”, or at very least “played loud”, but this one’s a nice oddity in its direction that “This compact disc should be played softly”.  It’s a recommendation that works just fine for these two vocal works and two percussive/tape works by Orlando Jacinto Garcia, born 1954 in Havana (emigrated to the US 1961).

First up is a choral tribute to Garcia’s early mentor, On The Eve Of The Second Year Anniversary Of Morton’s Death (1989).  The sole text is ‘la belleza del silencio es mi inspiracion’ – the beauty of silence is my inspiration – sung and whispered in little fragments.  Definitely a worthy tribute to Feldman.  In the following Improvisation With Metallic Materials (1990), the tape part is composed from piano timbres and then overlaid with sounds from a Yamaha WX7, a digital MIDI wind instrument.  As per the ‘Improvisation’ indication, there’s a nice, almost wind-chime-like formlessness to the piece, and not always mellow – it does clang around a fair bit, even at the suggested low volume.

Avant-garde vocal legend Joan La Barbara is the performer for Sitio Sin Nombre (1990), with her synthesized voice slowed down to an eerie groan before moving on to more plaintive and meditative cooing, and a little more out-there weirdness later on.  I’d go for that piece as a really lovely highlight of this collection.  Lastly, Metallic Images (1991) samples and manipulates bells and vibraphone tones for its tape part, and has a similar ambient drift to the Metallic Materials piece, but in an overall much more gentle vein.  All in all, this is a really nice collection of Garcia’s work, at any volume.

Alan Burns, slow goes the goose

http://slowgoesthegoose.blogspot.com/2017/12/orlando-jacinto-garcia-la-belleza-del.html