Zoro dantzak (Dances of the Mad) (1981) Mireille Guigui, soprano Delphine Pourment, alto Choeur Contemporain de I'Université d'Aix-en-Provence Roland Hayrabédian Félix Ibarrondo is one of those composers who bear witness to their time, who carry a message and who dare to express it. He also belongs to those who have the courage to watch the passing of snobberies and of fashions and do not seek to make people believe that they originated them. His music is lyrical at a period when no more than computation is in itself enough for the great majority. He does not shrink from writing melodic lines in small intervals when widely spaced leaps are taken for tokens of modernism. Is he then, in the end, a neoclassic? By no means. Like all modem composers one will find him in the atonal forest. It is not with impunity that he was the disciple of a Frenchman of Austrian origin who taught for some time in Madrid: Max Deutsch. We find tone clusters, but they are finely calibrated: it is a far cry from Cowell, Cage and Stockhausen. One thinks rather of Bartok's aggregates, but much denser in character. He makes use of the aleatory, but with him chance is strictly "filtered". As for phonemes, they are omnipresent in his vocal music. But they do not constitute either an ante-, a para-, or a meta-language; they are neither a gimmick, nor a flight from the literary: they are the quasi natural means of creating a melody and aggregations of vocal tone colour, a manner of orchestrating, as it were. And so it is that the same phonemes mean both "bloodied" and "light". But then, do not the same oboes and the same strings in the orchestra express both joy and tragedy? All these techniques are here the elements of a profoundly consistent style. Felix Ibarrondo (b. 1943) is, with Francesco Guerrero (b. 1951) and Josk Ramon Encinar (b. 1954), his younger contemporaries, one of the leading representatives of the young Spanish school. But more than that; we are a far from the stereotype Spain of the picture postcards, from the Andalusia of Gypsy flamenco. This is Basque country; this land tormented by fratricidal struggle whose folk music -particularly the folk music of the dance- is the most strictly classical, the most controlled folk music imaginable. It is, perhaps, to this spirit of rigorous severity that the desire for a classical control of modemism which can be observed in Ibarrondo's music is due. The Basque country is also the country of speech in extravagant outbursts, of anger as well as of laughter. And it is, perhaps, from these depths that the extraordinarily "musicalized" cries we hear in this recording surge forth. I will not forget the contained rages -contained, but in vain- of a Basque ballet master. I can hear them again here, in many of these long-held vocal lines, contained, and then wearing themselves out in rending sounds. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not rage that I find here, but rather a manner of being become a featur