JOSÉ CURA's "ECCE HOMO" at George Enescu Festival in 2021

JOSÉ CURA's "ECCE HOMO" at George Enescu Festival in 2021

. JOSÉ CURA COMPOSED "ECCE HOMO" at age 26 in 1989
. Romania Premiere in 2021
. Conducted by JOSÉ CURA himself

ELISA BALBO Maria, soprano
RAMÓN VARGAS Christ, tenor
ROXANA CONSTANTINESCU Magdalena, alto
MARIUS VLAD BUDOIU Iuda, Tribunos, Ioannes, tenor
NICOLAS TESTED Vox Creaturæ, Caiphas, Pilatus, bass
VLAD BUDOIU narrator

JOSÉ CURA composer, conductor and director
Philharmonia London
Academic Choir of Radio Romania,
Children's Choir of Radio Romania

Carmen Lidia Vidu multimedia director

🎆JOSÉ CURA --- I wrote Ecce Homo in 1989 for a tenor colleague of mine from Buenos Aires. The piece never premiered as my colleague and I, both youthful dreamers then, and without any power to turn our projects into reality, didn’t manage to gather the necessary elements that were needed for its making. Years passed and my artistic career headed in different directions. Ecce Homo, just like many other of my pieces, remained relegated to the back of a drawer. In 2016, I rediscovered it and realised, with joy —and pride— that, instead of having spent all these years simply gathering dust, the piece had matured, much like a good wine. Undoubtedly, a lot has to do with how I spent the last 30 years maturing as a man, and as an artist, something which has allowed me to revise the oratorio with an authority which would have been unthinkable in 1989.

Ecce Homo isn’t original; there are many compositions based on the last moments of the life of Jesus Christ, some of them legendary and unreachable; but it is original in its use of certain sections of the Bible, such as the Psalms, or the Stabat Mater —and of the initial poetry, There was once a king, written by myself in 1982— combined with the “theatrical” action of Christ’s Passion. The musical and dramatic layout of Ecce Homo combines the religious introspection of the masses —and their pagan irreverence— with the interventions of a Christ who is earthly tangible, who alternates between a mystical depth, corresponding to his divinity, and the visceral nature of his attacks of desperation, more akin to his human condition. In this sense, the moments which are especially moving for me are those three in which we witness a devastating sincerity: Jesus’ plight for help in Getsemahne reflected in Psalm 6 “Father, where art thou? Save me!”, his desperate cry in Golgotha “O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?”, and the Antiphon, interspersed in the Stabat Mater, in which the Virgin Mary, watching her son dying, asks: “Tell me, is there a greater pain than this?”

I chose not to fall into the triumphalist rhetoric of writing a great Hosanna in order to express the music of the Resurrection. I preferred reflecting the “Easter of Easters”, the cornerstone of the catholic faith, from the subtle and unexpected change of the darkness of the verses “Quando corpus morietur”, to the luminous and inspiring harmony of the words “Paradisi Gloria”, sung by children’s choir at the end of the piece, before the Amen.

José Cura

JOSÉ CURA "George Enescu Festival" in Bucharest in 2021
September 5th -- Grand Palace Hall in Bucharest

JOSÉ CURA's 3 works: "MODUS", "TE DEUM" and "ECCE HOMO"
Conducted by JOSÉ CURA himself
　
Program
◾JOSÉ CURA Modus (from Argentinian Requiem)
◾JOSÉ CURA Te Deum
◾JOSÉ CURA Ecce Homo

JOSÉ CURA (composer, conductor and director)

Philharmonia London, Academic Choir of Radio Romania, Children's Choir of Radio Romania

Polina Pasztircsák, Elisa Balbo, Roxana Constantinescu, Ramón Vargas, Marius Vlad Budoiu, Nicolas Testé, Vlad Ivanov.

Carmen Lidia Vidu multimedia director

Today is JOSÉ CURA DAY!

🎆Enescu Festival 2021 --- In our second performance at Romania’s Enescu Festival 2021, we welcome musical polymath José Cura as he makes his return to the Orchestra for the first time in 21 years.

Known across the world as one of the opera’s most extraordinary tenors, Argentine artist José Cura was originally trained as a conductor. He takes to the podium this evening in a performance of three of his own works, written for orchestra, choir and solo vocalists.
In the first half, “Modus”, a single highly personal from Cura’s Argentinian Requiem, his upcoming large-scale work dedicated to the victims of the Falklands War.

We are joined by soprano Polina Pasztircsák for the world premiere of Cura’s Te Deum, specially commissioned by the Enescu Festival for its 25th anniversary year. The 20-minute work features the combined forces of the Radio Romania Academic and Children’s Choirs, performing alongside the full orchestra.

To close, Cura’s monumental Ecce Homo, a deeply spiritual three-movement oratorio, recently recorded for the first time in Hungary. Tonight’s performance features soloists Elisa Balbo, Ramón Vargas, Roxana Constantinescu, Marius Vlad Budoiu and Nicolas Testé.