The Blue Voice of the Water was written for a co-commission from the Gulbenkian Orchestra and the São Paulo Symphony. I started to explore Brazilian poetry, especially Manoel de Barros, finding a verse of his that may be freely translated as “the voice of the water has a blue accent”. This triggered my imagination for this piece, which starts in the dark blue of the deep ocean, gradually rising to lighter tones as if returning to the surface. Luís Tinoco
For Portuguese composer Luís Tinoco, music has always been connected with the visual arts, film, theatre, and even with the light of Lisbon itself. Growing up near the ocean has also infiltrated his soundworld; not in a directly pictorial sense, but in a deeper, structural understanding of ebb and flow, of constancy and evolution.
Tinoco’s orchestral works reflect these influences, alongside other cultural allusions: Before Spring is a tribute to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and the vivid poetry of Manoel de Barros helped inspire The Blue Voice of the Water. The magical, ethereal Cello Concerto is dedicated to the artist who performs the work on this recording, Filipe Quaresma, acclaimed for his “precise, superbly articulated playing, full of passion yet often quite thoughtful” (The Strad). Frisland refers both to an imaginary island first put on the map by the 16th-century cartographer Nicolo Zeno, and to the jazz artist Bill Frisell. The result is a vibrant work which Tinoco describes as “an imaginary voyage through an (also imaginary) soundworld inspired by Frisell’s music”.
The recording features performances by four internationally-acclaimed orchestras gathered together on one disc.
