In a centenary celebration of the birth of Federico Garcia Lorca in the Lane Gallery on Sunday Benjamin Dwyer played a selection of music by de Falla, Granados, Tarrega and Torroba. The pieces for guitar were interspersed with readings of Lorca's poems by Julia Canosa I Serra, in Spanish and in translation, some in translation only. The music reinforced the stereotypes of Spain, or rather Andalucia, but the poetry ventured into an unhappy private world, full of a surreal clash of images.
The Sonnets of Dark Love (sonetos del amor oscuro) were possibly the last poems Lorca wrote. Their homosexual subject matter was probably the cause of their late appearance. They inspired Dwyer to write some pieces for oboe (Matthew Manning) and percussion (Richard O'Donnell). These pieces, together with Leo Brouwer's Cuban Folk Song and Maurice Ohana's Tiento, were a fitting tribute to a poet who regarded himself as being in the forefront of the literary movement of his time.
Dwyer's pieces, with titles evocative of love and death, explored the expressive possibilities of oboe and marimba, and of oboe and drums, ending with an unaccompanied reading, in Spanish, of the well-known Song Of The Rider (Cancion del Jinete).
