Clarinet with a Venezuelan accent

Presenting CD De Luz y Sombra

 Presenting De Luz y Sombra, Andrés Barrios' new music album

Interview with Andrés Barrios by Gorgias Sánchez in La Vitrina Virtual on August 7, 2020.

In 2018 I was invited by my dear friend Andrés Barrios to be the clarinetist "protagonist" of his album De Luz y Sombra. Towards the end of last year the project was completed and the album was released in digital media in June of this year 2020.

But first I would like to share a little story with you.

It was the year 1985 when I decided that I wanted to be a clarinet player. In those days there was no internet, therefore Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and all that vast collection of information, images, recordings and videos that we have access to today was simply unthinkable. While my parents were buying me the clarinet, I made myself a folder full of clippings, articles, photographs, a couple of cassettes (one by Benny Goodman and one by Richard Stoltzman) and everything related to the clarinet that I could put together at the time, so that it was the only way I had to nurture and imbue myself with what would be one of the great loves of my life. It was around those times when I happened to pass through one of the corridors of the José Angel Lamas Higher School of Music and saw a woodwind quartet rehearsing in one of the old rooms in the south wing. As if I was looking at a candy cabinet, I stayed glued to the living room window, studying in detail the clarinet player, his movements, his sound, gestures, even laughter and jokes, and naturally the clarinet. 

It was nothing more and nothing less than Andrés Barrios, who then traced his route to the shelves of the urban legends of the Caracas clarinet and who was surely tattooed in my memory as the first clarinetist I met in my life. At the end of the rehearsal, when the musicians were putting away their instruments, I went into the room and went over to Andrés to ask him about the clarinet, if he would let me see it closely and explain its different parts to me, which he did with great pleasure. Curiously, they had been rehearsing a piece of their own creation, one of their quartets for flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon. I had no idea then that I would find myself in front of this music some three decades later.

Next I welcome our hero of today, Andrés Barrios, who as our mutual friend Bartolomé Díaz describes as a “Reborn Renaissance Artist” given his multifaceted artistic activity. 

(Interview is in Spanish and you can listen to it by clicking on the following link. )

Full interview here.

Thank you very much, Andrés, for your contribution to the cultural heritage and to the musical and artistic history of our country, you are great! And thank you very much @Jaime De Armas for inviting us to exhibit a little of this work so Venezuelan and at the same time so unusual in this space as necessary and hopeful as the Vitrina Virtual.

I hope you have enjoyed this beautiful work, done with lots of love. You can purchase it on any of the main digital platforms such as spotify or applemusic. If you wish, you can visit Venezuela Música Viva and learn a little more about the details of this album at https://venezuelamusicaviva.com

Good health and lots of music for everyone!

Gorgias Sánchez

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