EXILIO: Ahmed Alom's Debut Album is OUT
IGM presents Exilio, the solo album debut of New York based, Cuban pianist, Ahmed Alom. Featuring six Hispanic composers—each of whom lived in exile, the album pays a tribute to history’s great composers and the music that was produced out of a necessity to make a home somewhere new. Ranging across nations, generations, and political climates, Exilio offers a journey from past to present, maintaining a central theme of hope and support for those who carry the weight of exile on their shoulders.
● Listen to Ahmed Alom's New Album
In this groundbreaking album, Alom presents the first-ever complete recording of the mesmerizing Four Intermezzos by Colombian composer Luis A. Calvo. This extraordinary collection also features exquisite works, including hidden gems like Falla's enchanting Canción, as well as compositions by Lecuona, Albéniz, Cervantes, and De La Chica. Prepare to immerse yourself in a musical narrative that powerfully tells the story of an artist's journey through exile.
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This project was curated by Colombian composer Julián De La Chica, who draws inspiration from his own book, God's Punishment, shedding light on the human rights violations that took place in Agua de Dios, the small town where Calvo lived and died.
Join us in celebrating the rich tapestry of music and the resilience of artists in the face of adversity.
Reviews | Notes | Articles
Being exiled—en Exilio—can take many forms, and music is, often times, not only a vehicle of expression for those in exile but an exiled manifestation itself. Music travels, finds new homes, and can be forever repurposed. Like composers, music can have many lives and many afterlives. Luis A. Calvo, for instance, one of the composers summoned for this album, was indeed a composer in exile; exiled within his own country not for political reasons but for the cruelty of social prejudices, themselves supported by the law and, in the end, powerful enough to enforce an exile much more merciless than any political exile. Luis A. Calvo was a victim of leprosy, which in the early twentieth century was enough reason to condemn a human being to social death in a leper colony. But his music was also, in a way, in exile inasmuch as it was symbolically charged, inevitably, with the stigma of the disease. However, unlike Calvo and his fellow sick compatriots in “The Country of Pain,” his music could not be contained nor restrained. Even if symbolically exiled, Calvo’s music journeyed across nations and continents, and even across time. Ahmed Alom’s album Exilio is yet another testimony of these journeys, one distinctly eloquent, the musical voice of a myriad of ongoing voyages.
—Sergio Ospina-Romero, PhD.
Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. Author of the book Dolor que canta. La vida y la música de Luis A. Calvo en la sociedad colombiana de comienzos del siglo XX.
Going through the history of the Spanish and Latin American piano opens up a sound spectrum that oscillates between echoes of melancholy, drama and loneliness. At least there are three words that come to my mind when I hear Ahmed Alom's performance on his album Exile. His voice, both as a migrant and as an artist, accounts for that spirit of resilience that shaped a large part of the work of composers such as Luis Antonio Calvo, Ignacio Cervantes or Ernesto Lecuona, in life circumstances that led them to find in the writing for piano a ground and a refuge to cultivate your introspection. I highlight that thread that links in such a coherent way the selection of musical works derived from those earthly and sentimental exiles, which were transformed into music through the creative exercise of the composers integrated into Alom's repertoire. I also applaud his dialogue with creators like Julián De La Chica, whose life experience adds to that narrative line and leaves, in our hands, a production worth contemplating, from its past references to its contemporary sounds.
— Luis Gabriel Mesa, PhD.
Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology from the University of Granada (Spain). Director of the Master of Music program at Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogota, Colombia.
In this production, the "minimalist" (not mannerist) interpretation of Calvo's four Intermezzos, stand out. Cuban pianist Ahmed Alom, offers a piano conversation between Luis A. Calvo, a Colombian composer victim of exclusion (he was exiled to the small town of "Agua de Dios", a detention camp for people diagnosed with Leprosy) and contemporary composers widely recognized (Falla, Albeniz, Cervantes and Lecuona), adding a current Colombian composer, Julián De La Chica, whose work and aesthetics respond to another historical and socio-cultural context. The memory of Cuba, however, seems to be an important axis in this album, which in its title refers to "exile", a term whose connotations are highly complex, and can lend itself to a broad debate. Being the solo debut album by Alom, I highlight his choice of works by Ibero-American composers, and his commitment to explore Calvo's work, proposing new perspectives for his performance.
— Susan Campos-Fonseca, PhD.
Doctor in music from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain).
Professor at the Universidad de Costa Rica.
This beautiful album is a moving tableau, performed with elegant phrasing, sumptuous sound, and deep commitment. Ahmed Alom is a wonderful pianist, and his generous focus on composers in exile shines a beacon of light on the plight and struggles of our humanity.
— Lisa Moore
Pianist (Australia)
Alom’s album, Exile, couldn’t be more timely, coming at this period of unrest, amidst the surge of migrants leaving their homes to find a better life elsewhere. In the United States, as we are beginning to examine our own complicated and shameful past, the music on this album represents composers who were victims of oppression in their native lands. The works played, including lesser known compositions by Calvo, Cervantes, Lecuona, and De La Chica, are performed by Alom with great sensitivity and compassion. His nuanced sense of touch brings out the humanity and elegance of this music, which deserves to become part of the canon.
— Simone Dinnerstein
Pianist (USA)