Pedro Vilarroig - Biography

Biography

Vilarroig was born in Madrid in 1954. His mother was a violinist and his father a painter. As a child, he often used to paint while listening to music. By this means, he heard a great deal of music by the great masters of classicism, who noticeably influenced him. While going for long walks, he would often hear new music in his head. Vilarroig graduated with a doctorate in Mining Engineer, and entered the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música of Madrid in 1973 when he was 19 years old (most of the Conservatory's students enter as young children).

When Vilarroig had finished his studies, he joined the Laboratorio de Interpretación Musical (Music Performance Lab) LIM for two years acting as a collaborator, performer and composer in electroacoustics.

Founder of the Asociación Musical Verda Stelo, he conducted a choir and a chamber orchestra for seven years. He read choral studies with the Czech professor Petr Fiala, participated in a composition workshop conducted by Carmelo Bernaola, conducted choirs in courses organized by the Federación Coral of Madrid, and wrote incidental music for courses led by Eduardo Armenteros and José Miguel Martínez at the SGAE in Madrid.

He has composed chamber and symphonic music, soundtracks for shorts, and has had other commissions for soundtracks, among them an audiovisual for the Spanish Foreign Office and two for the Natural Sciences National Museum of Madrid. Though he has composed numerous works for electroacoustics, his style is clearly neotonal with many influences, including Mahler, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Sibelius.

He is founder and president of the Asociación Española de Compositores Neotonales and he was the president of the Federación Coral de Madrid from 1999 to 2008. He has also taught Physics and Cosmology at the Universidad Politécnica of Madrid since 1980.

Composers' early works often consist of chamber pieces whereas orchestral works are composed later. This is the case of Vilarroig who made some pieces for piano as well as duos, but he soon started his symphonic works, managing to compose seven symphonies and a concerto for piano and orchestra between 1975 and 1990. Nevertheless the premiere of his second symphony did not take place until 2009 when it was performed by the Heredia Symphony Orchestra (Costa Rica) conducted by Eddie Mora. The critic Andres Saenz commented that the work "was finished when the composer was 22 years old. The symphony is composed of four movements and deploys a fully tonal harmonic language with some influences from composers as Mahler, Sibelius and Shostakovich, but mainly he has a look at the late post-Romantic period (end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th). In this decade (1970), when both the academy and the avant garde loathed the tonality, the young Vilarroig gathered up his courage giving the cold shoulder to atonality, represented by serialism and dodecaphonism. That way, the musical flow unfolds a view supported by a wide thematic body-language in a heroic and passionate spirit that states an underlying metaphor of fight and overcoming with an optimistic end.". Recordings of his third and eight symphonies took place in Moscow (2008) performed by the State Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra of Russia (conducted by Victor Ivanov), and his Concerto for piano and Orchestra in Prague was recorded by the pianist Luis Fernando Perez in 2006 and premiered in Madrid in November 2008. Later works, such as his Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, were performed in the first decade of the 21st century (Rivas, performed by Joaquín Franco).