THE CHESS PLAYER (EL JUGADOR DE AJEDREZ)

Alejandro Vivas’ music (“La conjura de El Escorial”, 2008) develops with restraint through the sensitivity and elegance of his own handwriting. For The Chess Player (Luis Oliveros), Alejandro composes a suggestive tableau showing the emotion underlying the protagonist’s movements: Diego Padilla, a Spanish chess champion, who gets entangled in fate’s knitting and ends up thrown in a SS prison, accused of espionage. Again, it is man against the machine. Creativity (emotion, sensitivity, tenderness) opposed to the regime’s coldness, personified in Colonel Maier, a strange playmate to the survival of the main character in hostile surroundings.

Alejandro tenderly transforms, through a delicate orchestration, movements in emotions. The strategy consists in a near pious chat overlapping the skin, the same way the 32 pieces hide behind the mystifying thoughts of the chess players. Flute, piano and cello (the most human of instruments) are the tools which Alejandro uses to draw on the pentagram his peculiar strategy, a talented musician’s scheme permeating drama into a story swelled in emotion. Flute, piano and cello are rocked by the subtle winds of the string, walking along with the chess player in his epic journey; winds (elegante ma non tropo) going across the chess board, jumping from square to square to reach the final stance…checkmate!

With this framework there is no chance of a tie. Either you win the game or you lose your life, that’s it. But behind Alejandro’s heartfelt melodies lie an aura of hope (held by the chess board) keeping stretched the emotions that the music lends to the story. The melody carries out the most complicated movement of them all, the one that allows the pieces to move over the board with a regal personality, leaving behind them emotion’s stamp, Alejandro Vivas’ genuine and mystifying strategy. --- from the label

Release Date: 2017/11/6

01. Main Title (1:52)
02. Dance in the Street (1:12)
03. Margaux's Birth (1:16)
04. A Walk in Paris (1:34)
05. Interrogation and Jail (2:41)
06. The General (2:58)
07. Chess Game I (1:05)
08. Desolation (2:32)
09. Uncertainty (1:37)
10. The Gathering (1:43)
11. The Arrest (1:46)
12. Visit to the Police Prefect (1:25)
13. Chess Game II (1:25)
14. Arrival of German Troops (2:01)
15. Writing Letters (1:24)
16. Reverie (2:02)
17. Liberation (2:29)
18. Trip to Bordeaux (1:45)
19. Love Theme (1:46)
20. Farewell (1:13)
21. Credits (3:48)
22. A Question of Love (1:13)
23. Remembering Paris (3:42)
24. In the Jungle (1:45)
25. Dance in the Street (0:37)