I became almost obsessed with it. Months had gone by and I could not get William Shake­­­speare’s Venus and Adonis out of my mind. The musicality of its verses, the magical cadence of its rhythms, the tender love she proved, his unkind rejection; all these had glued the book to these, my hands, the poem to my eyes. It was at this time and under these circumstances that Grace David­­son and I met at a café in London in 2018. A delicious scone accompanied our conversation, which soon turned to the master Bard. When we had recorded An Everlasting Dawn (2017), Grace had been very encouraging and expressed an interest in my music, the memory of which encouraged me to confess I was considering setting Venus and Adonis to music—a song cycle, naturally. She loved the idea. We spoke about it some more and, soon enough, I had my work cut out for me.

The first step was to select those parts of the poem that would become the song texts. I tried to be as least intrusive as possible. It was daunting (for the sheer beauty of each verse begs not be cut), and yet necessary (due to the practical impossibility of setting 1194 lines of text to music). And so I cut: each cut a wound stoically borne for music’s sake, like the sweet maple bears the bitter axe that wounds it for its honeyed sap. Creating a convincing dramatic arc with a good mix of varying styles and contrasting episodes was tough. Achieving a well-balanced distribution of the text between all three characters (i.e. Venus, Adonis, and the Poet) was hardly any easier, and required some clever editing at times. In the end, however, my efforts found me satisfaction.

The matter of musical cohesion had to be addressed as well. As with any set of songs, the texts themselves already offer a natural structure and cohesion of sorts, but that is hardly enough in a composition where language and music must cooperate in harmony. Creating explicit transitions from one song to the next crossed my mind early on, but seemed to me to work better for shorter cycles, such as Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. Perhaps a judicious use of this, complemented by other techniques, would be best; something closer to Schumann’s song cycles, whose connections linking song to song, although not always explicit, are exquisite, subtle, and incredibly effective.

What of the question of cohesion in the musical construction as such, I wondered. Should I tread Beethoven’s path or Wagner’s?… To read the rest of these programme notes by Rodrigo Ruiz, please download them here.

I remember vividly when I first heard Rodrigo Ruiz’s music. I was listening to a randomized playlist of new classical releases on Apple Music and happened upon a movement from a sonata for piano and violin. […] I was surprised to discover that the music was written in 2019; it was the first movement of Ruiz’s Violin Sonata, r. 6, from Behold the Stars, his album of chamber music (released by Signum Classics). I devoured his music after that. I listened to it on loop on long walks, I taught it in my music theory classes, and I devoted an episode of my Resounding Verse podcast to one of his songs. […] Rodrigo Ruiz’s music, I came to understand, is no mere imitation of Mendelssohn or Dvořák. Yes, it sounds like the music of these composers—and also, by turns, like Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, and Brahms. But he isn’t trying to mimic their styles, as a fledgling painter might mimic the work of earlier artists to master a technique. He is just writing what comes naturally to him. This isn’t model composition; it’s composition, pure and simple. Ruiz grew up in Tijuana, Mexico, listening to his father’s records of Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms, and he internalized their music to such a degree that once he began improvising at the piano, and writing down those improvisations, he produced music that breathed with the same spirit. He learned their style the way a child learns a native language.

Yet, as with any native speaker, he also speaks with his own voice, and that voice is clear in this cycle of seventeen songs based on William Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis, about the unrequited love that a goddess feels for a mortal man. (Ruiz judiciously chose only certain portions of the 1194-line poem, creating a dramatic arc with texts distributed evenly between three characters: Venus, Adonis, and the Poet.) What strikes me most about the cycle, and about Ruiz’s music in general, is his ability to move effortlessly between turbulence and tenderness; no matter the emotional extremes, the music flows. (It’s the same trait I sensed in the opening of his violin sonata, where quiet unrest opens up into warmth and light.) You can hear these deftly managed transitions across songs, especially when one song proceeds without pause to the next, which creates a strong narrative through-line. But distinct and separated songs are joined in subtler ways. Song II (“Frosty in desire”)—in which the “glowing fire” of Venus’s passion meets Adonis’s cold disinterest— ends tenuously, with a quiet F-major chord in the middle register of the piano, and Song III (“This countless debt”) starts Allegro vivace with sixteenth notes evoking Venus’s determination to get her man—frost is followed by fire. But the emotional shift sounds natural because even though “This countless debt” is in a different key (B-flat minor), its first phrase prolongs the dominant chord in that key (F major). This single chord is like a keyhole separating two rooms…    To read the rest of these programme notes by Stephen Rodgers, please download them here.