Relato improbable (2012)
(for accordion and ensemble)

Relato improbable was created as a preliminary study for a scene in the opera La ciudad de las mentiras, which I composed in collaboration with director Matthias Rebstock for Teatro Real in Madrid (première in February 2017). It is based on four stories by the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994), which are interwoven with each other. All four stories, like most of Onetti's works, are set in the invented provincial town of Santa María, a cipher for isolation, social hypocrisy and hopelessness. Each story centres on a woman who stubbornly and uncompromisingly rescues herself from this stagnation by creating a parallel identity: through dream, madness or fiction. These parallel identities are ultimately much more worthy than the supposedly real ones.

In one of these stories, El álbum, the invention of stories as an existential strategy takes centre stage and the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘lie’ are reversed: a young man falls in love with a woman who can tell magical stories about foreign countries and people and escapes Santa María's grey reality together with her. But when all the stories turn out to be real in the end, the boy feels betrayed, even though the woman has ‘only’ told the truth. Relato improbable, for accordion and ensemble, is based on one of these adventure stories. The specific content of the story (a storm at an old castle in Scotland) is not decisive for the composition, but rather the magic that unfolds from the act of storytelling itself. The soloist develops a virtuoso rhythmic performance in which the spoken text is interwoven with short percussive gestures on the instrument and in the ensemble. The fast tempo and pulsating metrics give this performance an even force that culminates in an explosive climax. This is followed by a long and equally hypnotic release of tension.

Elena Mendoza