Abraham Tena Manrique: Complete works for piano solo (2004-2019)

“Music entered my life through two channels. My paternal grandfather, Juan Tena Bielsa, was an organist, pianist, and band director. After he passed away, my parents decided to dedicate part of the inheritance towards buying a piano – there couldn’t have been a better tribute. Thus began my journey into the world of music. I first laid hands on a keyboard when I was seven, and now, over forty years later, my fingers remain passionately intertwined with the instrument.
More profoundly, I was nurtured in an environment deeply infused with music, thanks to my father, Manuel Tena Corredera’s, immense passion. He passed away in December 2020, leaving a legacy of love for classical music unmatched by anyone else I’ve known. Through him, I was introduced to the masterpieces of great composers in classical music history. Music was the constant backdrop to our home life, gently permeating the space I grew up in. Since my earliest memories, music has held a grip on me. My father’s essence is alive in music, forever accompanying me. This project is born out of a desire to honour his memory. Recording all the piano works composed during my father’s lifetime serves as a poignant milestone in my journey as a composer – a necessity musically, but more so personally. This entire endeavour is dedicated to my father, wherever he may be.”
The present recording encompasses all piano works spanning a period of 15 years, showcasing the unique piano language of Tena Manrique. His composition style is strikingly personal and distinct, earning admiration from many peers for its refusal to conform to any trend, an unequivocally personal proposition. As he once remarked in an interview published in the music magazine Ritmo, “I am my music; my music is me.” His music has never sought to be avant-garde or to chase current fads. His is a personal language that has evolved along with him as a composer, but always upheld something as crucial to him as tonality. Abraham is a staunch defender of tonality and of musical values that many have long taken for granted. Harmony, structure, melody, development, repetition, formal coherence, balance, counterpoint, and several other concepts nearly extinct in much of the music written in recent decades are aspects he ardently preserves.
We observe these crucial elements not only in his compositions for the piano, his chosen instrument, but across all his musical productions. These include compositions for piano duets, a multitude of works for diverse chamber ensembles (duos, trios, quartets, a mixed octet), the Oratorio on The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross Op. 40, as well as his Concerto for piano and orchestra “Khárôn” Op. 42. The latter piece, penned during his father’s illness, is naturally dedicated to him. Regarding this work, the composer shares:
“I journeyed across the Styx Lagoon with my father. It was a personal voyage that I felt compelled to translate into music. The concert, an exceedingly painful journey, concludes when the ferryman Khárôn reaches the opposite shore of the lagoon, and I must bid farewell to my father. Not only does the composition conclude at that point, but with my father’s departure on that distant shore, I also lost the music. Without him, music fell silent for those years. My father was synonymous with music, and without him, the music that had been a constant in my life was in mourning. Silence invaded my life and immobilised my pencil, rendering me incapable of writing anything.”
As for the origins of his compositions, it’s worth noting that many of Tena Manrique’s works are inspired by excerpts, paragraphs, or sometimes just a few sentences from novels or essays penned by luminaries of world literature. These texts provide an insightful glimpse into the essence of Abraham’s music. Let’s highlight a few particularly significant examples.
The Absences Op. 38 and Op. 39, composed in 2017 and 2018, draw inspiration from this poignant fragment of Marcel Proust’s The Confession of a Young Girl.
“Were I not so feeble, if I had the willpower to rise, to depart, I would wish to go and die in the Oublis, in the park where I spent every summer until I was fifteen. No place is so filled with my mother, for her presence, and even more so her absence, saturated it with her essence. Isn’t absence the most reliable, most potent, most vivid, most indestructible, and most loyal of presences for those who love?”.
The atmosphere that the composer manages to draw in these two Opus is that of a real absence. There is no doubt that Tena Manrique takes ownership, that he deeply feels that absence, so delicately conveyed by Marcel Proust; and he makes it music.
What lies behind the writing of The Seven Words of Christ on the Cross Op. 40 (dedicated to his mother Pilar), is a promise he made as a teenager. He prayed for the healing of his mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer, and he pledged to write a deeply religious work, with the same text as the work of the same name by the german composer, Heinrich Schütz. He had not written anything yet; perhaps that need to write that work marked the path that Tena Manrique began to walk. In 2018 that gratitude took shape, his writing already allowed him to delve into the composition of his Oratorio.To give a final example, we choose his Octet “Séneca” Op. 30 (mixed octet with soprano, alto, baritone, piano, violin, viola, cello and clarinet). Tena Manrique read several of Seneca’s Moral Epistles to Lucilius. But it was this small fragment that served him to write a work, published by Editorial Boileau and whose premiere was in charge of Sergio Espejo, principal pianist of the OCNE (Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España) and several of its soloists, at the Auditorio Nacional de Madrid in 2016.”…et mors, quam pertimescimus ac recusamus, intermittit vitam, non eripit; veniet iterum qui nos in lucem reponat dies.”
The piece is segmented into three movements, the first of which evolves around the phrase “death, which we fear and resist so much, pauses life, it doesn’t snuff it out”. The second movement sees the music recede to the piano alone, tasked with performing a Marcia funebre (included in this recording), before yielding to the final movement wherein we hear the phrase “he who will restore us to the light of day will return.”
Across all of Professor Tena’s musical productions, we find countless examples like those above, but his music doesn’t solely draw inspiration from literature. On other occasions, the spark of creation originates from his personal experiences. A telling instance of this is evident in his 2 Nocturnos Op. 4 (2008), penned shortly after the passing of his maternal grandmother, Dolores Miranda. Abraham vividly recalls that evening, in the solitude of his flat, when he felt compelled to echo hundreds of cherished memories with his grandmother in music, reliving and feeling them once more, as if he were experiencing them in that exact moment. In that state, he secluded himself in his study, laid his hands on the piano, and naturally, that gratitude of a grandson, found expression in music. The music simply flowed, it was within him and he merely had to transcribe it, not altering a single note of his Op. 4. Dozens of his compositions provide an intimate glimpse into their author, hence why he stated so unequivocally in that interview that he is his music, and his music is him.
Tena Manrique’s compositions for this instrument are unmistakably and inherently pianistic. This is one of the attributes that has piqued the curiosity of several fellow pianists. Across the fifteen-year journey that the composer portrays in these recordings, we can observe how he exploits all the possibilities that the piano, an instrument he’s known for over forty years, can proffer. What we won’t find in any of his works is sheer virtuosity. In lieu of the ostentation so commonly seen in piano compositions, Abraham’s work has consistently prioritised other aspects of the instrument that he finds more intriguing. Of course, there are virtuosic moments in some of his pieces, even some that showcase an extensive array of virtuosic technical concepts, but they’re always at the service of the music, always because the musical narrative necessitates them to fulfil an objective. This objective is ever-present in his work, which is none other than expressing an emotion through music, through that language his father introduced to him while he was still in his mother’s womb.
Over twenty musicians have incorporated his pieces into their concert repertoires, giving recitals in the USA (New York), Germany (Munich, Münster), United Kingdom (London, Birmingham), Albania (Korçë), as well as in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Lugo, Mérida, Menorca, Toledo, Vigo, Tarragona, just to cite a few locations within the Spanish geography.
Among these performers is his sister Esther, with whom he formed a piano duo. Throughout nearly a decade of concerts, some of his works featured in almost a hundred recitals. Tena Manrique extends his gratitude to the following musicians (listed alphabetically) for their engagement with his music: Luis Becerra, Montse Bertral, Riccardo Bozolo, Roser Carceller, Paula Coronas, Sergio Espejo, Patricia García Gil, Isabel Pérez Dobarro, Catia Moreso, Kiev Portella, Joana Resende, Ruben Russo, Eduard Saez, George Sand Piano Duo (Mireia Frutos and Laura Pérez Díaz), Jenna Sung, Anna Sutyagina, Raquel del Val, Fedor Veselov, Marjanthy, and Kostaq Vrame. Their willingness to interpret his music has been much appreciated.