Miren Urbieta-Vega - Ametsetan: Basque Songs (2019)

The stunning economic development of the Basque Country after the end of the last Carlist War (1876) turned into an artistic flowering almost without precedent in the first decades of the 20th Century. Music, particularly, was promoted as an identifying attribute and a tool for civic progress. In a context of advanced globalisation of the Western culture, a constellation of local authors aspired to measure themselves on equal terms with their European counterparts, although without giving up neither their own personality nor their vernacular roots. Nevertheless, each of them faced such a challenge depending on their particular circumstance, sensitivity and idiosyncrasy. In their own way, the three composers featured on this album summarize a historical, social, cultural, and geographical framework of thrilling eagerness, sometimes evanescent. Guridi and Sorozabal culminated their career in Madrid: the former acclaimed by the academia, the latter blessed with popular success, although condemned to an inner excile because of his dissident and controversial nature. Only Isasi died, prematurely, forgotten, in his homeland. Fortunately, and all the same, the good art does not pay duties in the frontiers of life.