* 2021 stock * Nobody who attended the first performance of Sexo Puro is ever likely to forget it. On that October afternoon, the conciliatory power of this work, which Maria de Alvear sees as a “meditation on inner goodness”, came into sharp collision with the irreconcilable powers that sometimes gather at contemporary-music festivals.

It was probably not even the theme of sexuality that so profoundly disturbed a part of the audience at the 1998 Donaueschingen Festival, even though it is seldom as explicitly dealt with as in this work. Nor was it the music, which is in principle very simple and can be followed without effort; a kind of music that is deliberately accessible and not aloof, which sounds mellow and sumptuous and sometimes almost luxurious, and never seeks confrontation. In all likelihood, the problem was the one demand that Maria de Alvear makes in this work, and indeed in all of her music: that listeners allow themselves to be unconditionally drawn into what is happening, to take part in this celebration and not get left out.

Sexo Puro is not something to be comprehended analytically, but something to be experienced, to be personally witnessed. People who are not prepared to do this, who would rather remain at a distance because they can imagine aesthetic perception solely as an act of mediation between a subject (themselves) and an object (the work), and not as an event that overcomes precisely this dualism, will indeed have a hard time with Sexo Puro. These listeners will likely miss the point of this work. - Raoul Mörchen