Background to the Project
The celebrated Australian composer Marián Budoš first met Australian guitarist Jacob Cordover in the year 2000, when Jacob entered as a student at the Canberra School of Music studying for his Bachelor of Music Degree at the Australian National University. With minimal but continued contact after Jacob left Canberra in 2004, the two only recently reconnected following a recital Jacob gave in Canberra in September of 2018.
In this concert, Jacob presented a program of musical storytelling – performing evocative, descriptive works, paired with the intention to open the audience's imaginations and use the music as a guide to navigate through stories of love, fear, life, death, joy and sorrow. When the composer Marián Budoš finished reading the English translation of the Catalonian novel Confessions by Jaume Cabré at the start of 2016, he was so moved by it that he could not stop thinking about the plots and the characters from the novel for weeks. The idea that this book must be turned into music sprang into his head, and from then on, he started sketching ideas for an orchestral work. After hearing Jacob's concert in Canberra, Marián, impressed with the ability to communicate a story to an audience through nothing but music, decided to turn Cabré's book into a guitar concerto written for Jacob Cordover. In October 2018 the author Jaume Cabré, and his agent Gloria Gutiérrez, met with Marián and Jacob at the Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells in Barcelona, where the author, thrilled with the idea, kindly gave permission to put his masterpiece to music. |