A la vora del mar (By the Sea)

Commissioned by the Coral Cantiga at the request of its director Josep Prats to celebrate the choir’s 40th anniversary, A la vora del mar is a short composition for a cappella choir, of about six minutes in length.

The two poems are taken from Salvador Espriu’s “Cementiri de Sinera” and are combined to achieve a ternary form (Slow-Fast-Slow). The initial Lento evokes a free, drowsy and irrecoverable past that lives only in memory. The absence of the bass voices takes us to a lofty and distant world, although tinged with nostalgic pessimism. When the basses enter singing “Avui cau nit de força” (literal translation: “today falls night of strength”) it is the prelude to the shipwreck that threatens the “bad weather” that the poet is experiencing. The following Allegro fugato tells us about the “fire of the sea” in a more aggressive and rebellious tone. Once the storm has calmed, the music of the Lento returns with a more serious and pathetic tone that only leaves a spark of hope in the last perfect major chord.