The music of Benet Casablancas challenges every assumption about musical modernism. His style follows on from the avant-garde of the 1960s, but where we might expect terse discourse and expansive forms, Casablancas offers succinct displays of clarity and colour. His music is sensual and always lives in the moment, sometimes knotty but never insistent. It is a musical outlook that owes much to the composer’s roots in Catalonia, whose culture has a tradition of playfulness and whimsy. Paul Griffiths describes his music as ‘Schoenberg in the Barcelona sun’.

That mingling of Mediterranean and central European goes back to Casablancas’s youth. As a student of both music and philosophy in Barcelona, his greatest interest was the music of the Second Viennese School. This led to further studies at the Vienna Academy of Music, where his principal teacher was the composer Friedrich Cerha, best remembered today for his completion of Berg’s Lulu. But like many composers of his generation (he cites George Benjamin and Oliver Knussen as influential friends and colleagues), Casablancas was increasingly frustrated by the rigours of serial technique, gradually moving towards a more intuitive approach to texture and sound.

Casablancas is also a musicologist, and his first major publication was a book about humour in music, El humor en la música (2000). Although he is sceptical about whether his writings inform his music, his study of wit in other composers’ works is illuminating. Haydn, naturally, figures large, as does Ligeti. Like them, Casablancas often catches his listeners off guard. Repetitions of ideas become distorted in unpredictable ways. Instrumental textures often move into extreme registers or surreal sound combinations. Casablancas has written about the comic potential of performance techniques that weaken or reduce the sound (string harmonics, for example, or muting effects), and these often appear in his own music, attenuating the textures for expressive effect.

Brevity, of course, is the soul of wit, and Casablancas is a master of miniature forms. Early in his career he began to write a series of works structured as sets of ‘epigrams’, among them one for sextet (1990), a set of three for symphony orchestra (2001), seven for piano (2000-03) and New Epigrams (1997) for chamber orchestra, to a commission from the London Sinfonietta. More recently, apart from another set of epigrams for piano, Epigramas cervantinos (2016), Casablancas has also composed several sets of ‘haikus’ (beginning in 2007 with one for piano trio), similarly concise movements, which also reflect a newfound interest in Japanese culture. In both cases, the movements are typically just a few minutes in length, but are never rushed or densely argued, simply presenting a single musical idea with clarity and concision. As with all of Casablancas’s music, the immediacy and vibrancy of the textures make each one of these short movements vivid and memorable. In 2003, Jonathan Harvey, another close friend and kindred spirit, wrote approvingly of the epigrams series, pointing out that internal symmetries and balances of phrases contribute to the clarity of expression: ‘The epigram states an idea briefly, punchily, with wit even. It leaves something to be desired, some mystery to do with unpacking its meaning. This is the music of someone who does not wish to labour points: they should be made concisely and then be done with.’

Another important dimension of Casablancas’s music is his interest in visual arts, and many works have titles that acknowledge the influence of painters. Given the immediacy of his style, and his taste for surprising juxtapositions and unexpected changes of course, it is little surprise that he is drawn to surrealism and abstract expressionism. The brief orchestral showpiece Intrada sobre el nom de Dalí (2006) vividly invokes Salvador Dalí’s surreal vistas in music derived from the letters of the artist’s name. Dove of Peace, Homage to Picasso (2009-10) draws inspiration from Pablo Picasso’s post-war image of the bird, an iconic plea for harmonious world order after years of bloodshed. This concerto for clarinet and chamber ensemble is a commission from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for Ensemble 10/10 and Nicholas Cox. The tranquillity of its opening is gradually disturbed by ominous and increasingly disruptive interjections from bass instruments. The ensuing turbulence is eventually overcome through lyrical interjections from the solo clarinet, melodic and pure with a hint of birdsong.

Artistic representations of darkness are a particular interest. The word ‘dark’ often appears in work titles, and its visual dimension is most clearly invoked in the chamber orchestra piece Four Darks in Red (2009). This work was commissioned by the Perspectives Ensemble of New York and inspired by the city’s artist Mark Rothko’s 1958 painting, which Casablancas saw when it was on loan to the Tate Modern in London. He was drawn to the way Rothko gradually melds the ochre hues into rectangular areas of darkness. The music’s structure is based on a close study of the painting’s proportions. Darkness is evoked through a gradual purifying of the orchestral textures, through sustained low-pitch passages and through incremental fading effects – at one of which Casablancas writes a Rothko quote over the score, ‘Silence is so accurate.’

Although he is more of a painter in sound than a storyteller, Casablancas often draws on literary sources, and he has a particular interest in Shakespeare. During the early years of the millennium, he began writing large-scale orchestral works (the smaller-scale collections of miniatures continuing to be written in parallel), one of the first being The Dark Backward of Time (2005). Darkness, again, is a key theme here, this time via Prospero’s description of memory early in The Tempest, ‘What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?’ Despite the larger scale of the work (almost 20 minutes long for large orchestra), the music is still conceived along chamber lines. The tempest, and with it the chaotic nature of half-formed memories, is expressed in visceral tutti outbursts. But these are framed and assuaged by the many passages of quieter music from smaller groupings. The composer writes, ‘The heart of the score exudes tranquillity, in an intimate climate of transparent sound and chamber refinement.’

Such poetic inspirations find literal voice when words enter Casablancas’s music. One of his most performed works is another meditation on Shakespeare, Seven Scenes from Hamlet (1989). Rather than set Shakespeare’s words directly, he has key passages recited by an actor. Each soliloquy is followed, and sometimes accompanied, by the chamber ensemble, offering brief glimpses into the psychological turmoil of the characters. The result is typical of the composer: brief windows into vividly imagined worlds.

A major recent work is his first opera, L’enigma di Lea (2016-18), premiered in Barcelona in 2019. Words and music now come together in more traditional ways, though the dark tone and many moments of psychological insight are much in the spirit of the earlier Hamlet score. The libretto, by Catalan poet and philosopher Rafael Argullol, projects archetypes from classical mythology into a modern-day setting. The abstract narrative sets love and eternal humanistic values against the oppressive forces of corrupt power and societal repression. As ever, Casablancas retains his chamber-music sensibility, even when writing for a huge orchestra. Percussion is used to particularly colouristic effect, and translucent woodwind textures ensure clarity of line, even in the darkest and most dramatic moments. The highly expressive vocal writing reveals a lyrical side to the composer, latent in his earlier instrumental music but now given full reign, especially in the writing for the title-role, memorably portrayed by mezzo Allison Cook in the first production.

Most of Casablancas’s recent works have been written in the shadow of L’enigma di Lea and share that work’s sound world and dramatic weight. Large-scale writing is his new norm. His Violin Concerto, The Door in the Wall (2021-22), inspired by HG Wells’s short story, was premiered by Leticia Moreno with the Spanish National Orchestra in March 2023. Next will be a recorder concerto for Michala Petri. Both are for full orchestra, unlike his earlier chamber concertos. He also has another opera on the horizon. Music on such a scale seems a world away from his epigrams and vignettes, but Casablancas doesn’t see it that way. He points out that even a large work is made up of many moments that can play out with intricacy and precision. In this, he says, he lives by the words of Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Caress the details, the divine details. In high art and pure science, detail is everything.’

Casablancas on record

‘The Art of Ensemble’

London Sinfonietta / Felix Krieger Sony

This 2018 release is a stunningly performed showcase of music for chamber orchestra, including both chamber concertos and Four Darks in Red, after Rothko, the composer’s most iconic invocation of darkness.

String quartets and trio

Arditti Quartet Tritó

Since the making (in 2009) of this recording featuring his ‘complete’ string quartets, Casablancas has written two more. Raging in the Dark (2006-09) – String Quartet No 3 (but chronologically the fourth in the series) – was written for the Arditti Quartet and is based on contemplations of darkness in WB Yeats.

The Dark Backward of Time. Intrada sobre el nom de Dalí. Love Poem. Postlude. Three Epigrams

Ofelia Sala sop Barcelona SO / Salvador Mas Conde Naxos

Recorded in 2007, this selection of music for large symphony orchestra demonstrates the composer’s ear for vivid and innovative instrumental combinations. It includes the dizzyingly virtuoso Three Epigrams, plus the suitably surreal Intrada sobre el nom de Dalí.

L’enigma di Lea

Allison Cook mez et al; Chor and Orch of Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona / Josep Pons Naxos (4/22)

The first production, from Barcelona, of Casablancas’s o opera. A bleak industrial setting, from director Carme Portaceli and set designer Paco Azorín, frames a mythical narrative and music of great sensitivity and expressive power.

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This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today