Josu de Solaun

Josu De Solaun (1981)
Toccata [Preludio, Fantasia, Ciaccona on a theme by  Busoni] (2026)

Josu De Solaun (1981)
Three Concertante Glosses from the Spanish Songbook (2026)

Joaquín Turina (1882-1949)
Picturesque Sonata, Op. 24 “Sanlúcar de Barrameda” (1921)

Josu De Solaun (1981)
21 “Tientos” (2025-2026)

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)
Fantasía Baetica [Andalusian Fantasy] (1919)

[there will be a short improvisation before and after each major piece of the program]

Letter to the Listener

Dear Listener,

I do not know exactly what has brought you here. Sometimes one enters a concert hall because one knows a piece, sometimes because one trusts a name, sometimes because the day allows it and something inside quietly says: enter. I have no entirely clear reason for playing this music in this way, here and now. Some decisions are made before they can be explained, and perhaps the only honest gesture is not to pretend that one always knows why…

This recital begins from a resolute premise: it understands music as a field of practice rather than a division of musical roles. Composition, improvisation, transcription, and interpretation are not treated here as separate disciplines, but as different articulations of a single musical-gestural continuum. This generalist approach is not opposed to rigor or depth; it is opposed to fragmentation. It is closely aligned with the artistic ethos of Ferruccio Busoni, for whom music was never the execution of a function, but the continuous rethinking of sound through touch, memory, and imagination.

I increasingly think of this position as that of a musician generalist, not in the sense of mastering everything, but in remaining permeable to multiple modes of musical thinking. Music, before becoming a profession or a specialization, was a way of being in the world. This recital is shaped by that conviction.

The short improvisations placed before and after each major work are not introductions, explanations, or commentaries. They acknowledge something simpler and more demanding: music does not begin with the score, nor does it end with it. They mark a threshold between memory and present action. Improvisation here is not freedom opposed to form, but responsibility assumed without protection. It is a way of remaining in contact with immediacy, with the self as it is today, rather than with an abstract idea of correctness or style.

This idea of immediacy also shapes the way I program. I can no longer approach what is usually called the classical repertoire as a neutral administrator—as a kind of museum curator—because that position already assumes an abstraction I do not believe in. Programming, for me, cannot begin from the notion of repertoire or canon, which are useful historical categories but ultimately impersonal. It must begin from something closer to a personal songbook: a body of music that one has inhabited, struggled with, been shaped by, and cannot play without being implicated as a human being.

This is also why canonical repertoire occupies a different place in my programs today. One cannot meaningfully play the Austro-German tradition—so central to recital life—without remaining in contact with the vernacular, bodily, and ritual sources that once nourished it: folk rhythm, dance, song, gesture. When that contact is lost, the canon risks becoming a museum of gestures rather than a living language. Programming, therefore, is not for me a curatorial act, but an existential one: an anthropic alignment between what is played and how one listens, lives, remembers, and stands in the world.

My Toccata (Preludio, Fantasia, Ciaccona on a theme by Busoni) is an original composition written in explicit dialogue with Busoni’s practice. The reference is neither imitation nor decorative homage, but procedural and ethical. The title, structure, and parenthetical form consciously echo Busoni’s own Toccata, while the use of a Busoni theme follows a practice central to his thought: composition as transformation, transcription as creative thinking, and tradition as living material. As Busoni moved freely from Bach to Chopin and from notated music to vernacular sources, this work treats inheritance not as something to preserve intact, but as something to be tested, bent, and re-voiced through touch.

The Three Concertante Glosses from the Spanish Songbook arise from the same lineage, but extend it into a deliberate act of repertoire expansion. Iberian music has, of course, produced a rich pianistic tradition rooted in vernacular idioms. What has remained largely marginal, however, is the transformation into concert repertoire of musical languages traditionally excluded from the classical canon: copla, zarzuela, popular theatrical song, bolero, taurine romance. These glosses engage precisely that terrain. They do so consciously in the spirit of Ferruccio Busoni, for whom transcription and arrangement were not secondary crafts but central modes of composition—ways of thinking musically through the transformation of inherited material.

They are not arrangements, and not folkloric stylizations. They are glossae in the medieval sense: acts of musical thinking carried out from within a living vernacular, written for the modern concert piano with full awareness of its architectural and virtuoso capacities. In this sense, they seek to open a pianistic path analogous—though not imitative—to what Liszt achieved with Hungarian material: not preservation, but transformation into a new concert language.

Each glossa engages a concrete source. La Campanera, a celebrated Andalusian copla, balances intimacy and theatrical exposure, desire and distance. The Gleaners’ Chorus from La Rosa del Azafrán embodies collective labor, cyclical time, and the dignity of anonymous voices central to Spanish popular theater. Romance of Courage, rooted in taurine song, confronts courage not as bravura, but as exposure—an ethics of standing one’s ground before risk. In all three cases, the vernacular is not quoted as color, but allowed to generate form, conflict, and virtuosity from within.

Within this framework, Joaquín Turina’s Picturesque Sonata, Op. 24 appears not as picturesque description, but as a meditation on dwelling. In Spanish art, place is rarely mere landscape. It is lived time, inhabited rhythm, a way of being. Titles name spaces not to represent them, but to dwell within them musically. Sanlúcar de Barrameda functions here as a locus amoenus, almost Arcadian, yet never idealized or detached from life. Tower, street, beach, and fishermen articulate complementary modes of dwelling: distance without domination, coexistence without hierarchy, suspension without narrative drive, repetition without spectacle. The street brings friction, the beach suspends time between land and sea, the fishermen embody labor as rhythm rather than image. Turina’s form does not offer refuge; it demands responsibility.

After the pause, my cycle of 21 Tientos unfolds. These pieces were not conceived as a closed system nor as a predesigned cycle. They appeared one by one, over time, as responses to concrete situations—personal, geographic, historical. The term tiento is used in its original Iberian sense: to try, to feel one’s way, to touch without possession. The modal references indicated are not theoretical systems, but poetic orientations of breath, gravity, and temporal pressure. Noise and song, stillness and violence, ritual and interruption coexist without resolution. Cities, landscapes, languages, and forms of exile are inscribed not as narrative, but as tension. Identity is not affirmed; it is exposed as movement. The piano is treated not as a neutral instrument, but as a remembering body.

The recital concludes with Manuel de Falla’s Fantasía Baetica, where the inner unity of the program becomes explicit. Deeply rooted in flamenco and cante jondo, the work treats rhythm as law rather than color, and gesture as necessity rather than effect. At the same time, Falla’s engagement with Indian music and the study of raga open the piece toward a broader conception of modality, cyclic time, and melodic gravity beyond Western functional harmony. This encounter does not weaken the classical tradition; it renews it from within. Precision here is only the minimum condition. Without risk, accuracy becomes empty. The work does not close the recital—it confronts it.

This program proposes no hierarchy between composition and interpretation, no separation between tradition and invention. It proposes a practice: one in which the musician stands as a generalist, not to master everything, but to remain permeable to what precedes him and what exceeds him. If something remains exposed tonight, it is because it has not been protected. Perhaps to make music today is simply this: to allow sound, memory, and presence to meet without asking permission.

Josu de Solaun

Tickets

Regular: 25,00 €
Over 65: 20,00 €
Under 30: 10,00 €

Busoni Festival Mini Package
27.08. Yifan Wu – Auditorium – 20:00 h
28.08. Nikola Meeuwsen – UNIBZ Library – 12:00 h
28.08. Josu de Solaun – UNIBZ Library – 20:00 h
29.08. Kit Armstrong – Palazzo Mercantile – 11:00 h
29.08. Igor Levit – Auditorium – 20:00 h
Regular ticket: 90,00 € // Over 65: 60,00 € // Under 30: 30,00 €

Teatro Comunale (Civic Theatre)
Piazza Verdi 40, Bolzano
Tuesday–Friday: 2:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Saturday: 3:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Closed on Sunday and Monday

Tel +39 0471 053800
info@ticket.bz.it
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In addition, the box office is open one hour before each concert.