Papalote
Version of the piece for Treble voice and violin, made in 2007 for the composer’s 50th birthday concert.
29 September 2007 at the Warehouse in London.
Hilda Paredes’s music for strings achieves a rare airy balance. the image could be that of a kite- a string instrument in itself, one might say- is tehtered, but nevertheless tugs and swoops. So does this music.
In Papalote the vocal melody is at once ingenious and natural – and relatively simple because Paredes was writing here for her stepson as a boy treble. But it is also fascinatingly ambiguous, not least in how that opening A–E, which embeds the voice in the instrumental music, also springs open a vista back to folk song, rather as Rocio González (one of the most admired Mexican poets of Paredes’s generation) does in her poem.
Paul Griffiths.