RITUAL, Isabel Villanueva’s new album for viola solo has been released on 23.3.23, available in physical format under the label Viola Power and on all digital platforms.

In her second album she presents a sound meditation that invites us to connect with our inner silence through music. A journey of sound that starts from the enigmatic first notes of the ‘Ode to Wisdom’ by Hildegard von Bingen, the abbess of the Middle Ages, to the last passages of the ‘Parade’ from the ‘Sonatas del Rosario’ by the baroque master Heinrich Ignaz Biber. Meanwhile, the selected miniatures of the cycle ‘Games, Signs and Messages’ of the current Hungarian referent György Kurtág, and at the heart of that hypnotic itinerary, one of the capital works of the most universal repertoire, the ‘Partita n.º 2, BWV 1004’, where the paradigmatic Ciacona by Johann Sebastian Bach is inserted. Defying time and space, Villanueva configures a concert program in an organic way, putting together a circular format without a solution of continuity that connects authors from different eras, styles and contexts.

RITUAL, ‘Exceptional Album of the Month’ May 2023, Scherzo Magazine “Daring and risk are two recurring elements in Villanueva’s projects, and Ritual is no exception (…) Villanueva offers a stylistically impeccable interpretation without strictly adhering to historicist dictates, a reading always attentive to the organic development of the form as if music were in itself a metaphor for life, the journey of a sound seed that germinates, grows, expands and reaches its culmination and death, which is but a return to the seed.”