Recordings

Royal Scottish National Orchestra · Eduardo Portal, conductor · Cristo Barrios, clarinet soloist in Ayssuragan

Maghek is Gustavo Díaz-Jerez’s cycle of seven symphonic poems devoted to landscapes and natural references from the Canary Islands. Cristo Barrios appears as soloist in Ayssuragan, a work for clarinet and orchestra inspired by La Palma and written for him. The piece combines procedures associated with spectralism, mathematics and computation with a strongly melodic and timbral discourse, moving from intimate, dark areas to episodes of great momentum. The recording brings together the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Eduardo Portal. Within this discography, it is presented explicitly as Cristo’s solo collaboration in a compositional project by Díaz-Jerez, rather than as an album of his own.

Gustavo Díaz-Jerez, piano · Cristo Barrios, clarinet · Savva Fatkulin, violin · Cecilia Bercovich, viola · Ángel García Jermann, cello

Music from Out of Time II brings together contemporary Spanish chamber music in different formations, from solo piano to piano quartet. Cristo Barrios appears in Laberintos by Laura Vega and Dolce by David del Puerto. Laberintos begins from a poem by Belinda Sánchez and transforms motifs, textures and masses of sound into a journey that uses the labyrinth both as a musical image and a symbol. Dolce alternates fluency and rhythmic precision, calm and contrapuntal rigour, demanding constant changes of character and colour. The album places these works alongside music by Gustavo Díaz-Jerez, José Luis Turina and Mikael Trillo-Figueroa within a chamber-music panorama of recent creation.

Cristo Barrios, clarinet · Melomics Ensemble · London Symphony Orchestra and guest soloists

IAMUS documents Cristo Barrios’s participation in the Melomics research project at the University of Málaga. Iamus was developed as a system capable of generating contemporary music in conventional notation through biomimetic and evolutionary procedures; the resulting scores were then taken on by human performers. The album combines the London Symphony Orchestra with various soloists and members of the Melomics Ensemble. Cristo participates as clarinettist in repertoire including Alphard for solo clarinet and Hello World! for violin, clarinet and piano. The interest of the recording lies both in its sonic result and in the encounter between computational research, musical writing and real interpretative decisions.

David Ballesteros, violin · Cristo Barrios, clarinet · Gustavo Díaz-Jerez, piano

The album brings together chamber music by Robert Gerhard and Joaquim Homs in a combination of works for clarinet, violin and piano, duos, solos and trios. In Homs, the programme concentrates on chamber writing that is particularly representative of his sensibility. Gerhard is also represented by less familiar pieces: early works preserved in manuscript, material connected with film and music that traces different moments in his trajectory. With David Ballesteros and Gustavo Díaz-Jerez, Cristo Barrios takes part in a programme that does not reduce the two composers to a single aesthetic, but instead reveals the diversity of registers, formations and sonic solutions running through their chamber output.

Cristo Barrios, clarinet · Evelyn Chang, piano

The project grew out of an initiative by Cristo Barrios and resulted in six commissions for clarinet and piano from six Canarian composers, three from Tenerife and three from Gran Canaria. The album therefore does more than document existing repertoire: it contributes directly to expanding it. With Evelyn Chang, Cristo presents six distinct musical languages within the same chamber formation, from Metaimpromptu to Lamento del Alba. The original booklet emphasises precisely this combination of curiosity, commitment to contemporary creation and attention to composers from the region. For the RALS project, the recording also opened a specifically chamber-music strand within its catalogue of music created in the Canary Islands.

Cristo Barrios, clarinet · Clinton Cormany, piano

This recording explores abstract music for clarinet and piano after Brahms’s two great sonatas. The programme brings together six 20th-century works —Bernstein, Brotons, Berg, Bax, Salonen and Honegger— that extend the sonata tradition through very different languages, countries and sensibilities. Three are sonatas, one is a sonatina and the remaining works function as cycles closely related to that form. The choice deliberately avoids a predictable survey of the repertoire and sets lyricism, modernism, atonality and highly demanding instrumental writing against one another. Rather than offering a historical panorama, it proposes listening to how the same chamber formation is transformed across the century.

Cristo Barrios, clarinet · Clinton Cormany, piano

The Voice of the Clarinet began as a highly personal experiment: transferring to the clarinet repertoire associated with the sung word and asking what remains when the text disappears. With pianist Clinton Cormany, a colleague from his postgraduate years at the Royal Academy of Music, the recording ranges across several centuries of art song and different European traditions. The selection combines familiar works with less usual choices and places breath, legato, inflection and the character of each song in the foreground. The result does not seek to imitate a voice, but to explore how much of its line, intimacy and expressive impulse the clarinet can retain.