Composer Eduardo Morales-Caso hails from Cuba, but the liner notes of Verso's release of his music, Eduardo Morales-Caso: La Nave de Los Locos, takes special pains to note that he is Spanish and has lived and taught in Spain since 1996. The disc contains five pieces composed between 1990 and 2006, and in them Morales-Caso achieves varying degrees of success; the liner notes hail his "lyricism, symbolism, drama, strength and virtuosity" and note that his "musical thoughts are underlined by great contrasts in the parameters of linguistic and musical technique," whatever that means. In short, his Sonata para violin solo (2006) has a very effective and strongly rhythmic last movement, but two weak opening ones; it's a little like
Bartók's Sonata for violin solo, except that its not as well written. Awake (2001), which is a "recitative and aria for solo soprano" is the least successful piece on the album; its meandering melodic line, while lyric in a sense, just isn't very gracious sounding for the soprano; it is sort of like listening to the soaring soprano near the end of
Varèse's Poème électronique for 8 minutes instead of 10 seconds. However, the rest of the album gets gradually better; the fantasy for viola and harp, Le rouge et noir (2004), takes a long time to get off the ground, but once it is airborne, it does find a vein of lyricism to mine. The song cycle El vacío (1990-1993) achieves quite a bit of expressive power within the strict limits of its strongly minor-flavored and restrained idiom. The title work, La nave de los locos (The Ship of Fools, 2002) is a piano fantasy that is written in a
Ginastera-like fashion; a loud, boisterous toccata requiring quite a bit of strength and endurance on the part of the pianist, it is formally somewhat fragmented, but fairly involving in spots. It embodies some of the best strengths of the last movement of the violin sonata and is a little more effective than that work.
The performances are all well done, as is Verso's recording, though a program of this kind essentially lives or dies on the strength of its compositions. Morales-Caso clearly has talent, though he seems to have difficulty finding the right project to channel his efforts into, and he is to an extent struggling with the legacy of the twentieth century. Once he finds his way, Morales-Caso might be a composer who makes good on the promise shown, among seeds sown on bare ground, in Verso's Eduardo Morales-Caso: La Nave de Los Locos.