“Vuelo” (Flight) for soprano, 2 vln, vla, vc, db, and pno.
When commissioned in 2018 by the Spanish Sonor Ensemble, Velazquez drew upon the writer who had partly inspired her previous string quartet “Elegia” (2017)- the 20th century Spanish and playwright Miguel Hernandez, who produced many of his works while in lifetime imprisonment for anti-fascist views. For her new work, Velazquez now consulted Hernandez’s poem “Vuelo, in which the incarcerated speaker discusses a desire for freedom and flight, for her libretto. Though Hernandez produced the poem in jail, for Velazquez, the poem’s intensity of feeling transcends the poet’s own circumstances to be recognizable at any point in time.
Velazquez allowed Hernandez’s poem, from which she took excerpts, to influence the structure; like the text the music vacillates between a vitality and resignation. The concluding atmosphere is spacious, yet stark, in the manner of Hernandez’s own last line: “El hombre yace. El cielo se eleva. El aire mueve” (“the man lies down. The sky lifts itself. The air moves”).
(From Jennifer Gersten Program Notes, Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, 2024).