The album Falla 1915 offers us the opportunity to experience a composer reborn through two of his masterpieces. In Siete canciones populares espanolas, the orchestral imagination of composer Francisco Dominguez enriches the original piano accompaniment without losing any folkloric substance. The first version of El amor brujo rediscovers a title that was created to be much more jondo [deeper], rawer and with more gypsy soul than the ballet it later became. Passion and spirit, sensuality and color come together to highlight what Falla loved and defended most: the preservation of our memory and our cultural heritage.
Doug Rosener, a master of the marimba, presents a great program of contemporary works for Marimba. Works from composers Takatsugu Muramatsu, Dwayne Rice, David Gillingham, Gordon Stout, and Joaquin Turina are included, as well as Daniel Levitan's Baroque Suite, where Rosener is joined by flutist Alina Windell. Dr. Doug Rosener serves as Associate Professor of Percussion and Associate Director of Bands at Auburn University. In addition to teaching the applied percussion studio, Dr. Rosener teaches courses in percussion literature, percussion skills, Finale techniques, and directs the Auburn percussion ensemble and Auburn University Marching Band drumline. During Dr. Rosener's tenure, the drumline has been the subject of two separate features on VicFirth. Com, and both the percussion ensemble and steel band have appeared on Alabama public television.
Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Arr. P. Navarro-Alonso)
Dacapo Classical
CD
$19.99Oct 19, 2018
These Goldberg Variations present new perspectives on a well-known score. Danish composer Peter Navarro-Alonso's composition is a note-by-note reinvention of the original Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach. Thus Alpha's innovative performance adds no additional notes in comparison to the original. It is merely through the very creative and extreme orchestration that the new composition gains it's own life. "The combination of recorder, saxophone and percussion is clearly not very well suited to a baroque-style reorchestration," claims Peter Navarro-Alonso, responsible for this arrangement tailor made for the members of Alpha. "But the richness in that combination lies in it's enormous diversity in timbre and dynamics." Alpha is a unique Danish ensemble, founded by Bolette Roed, Peter Navarro-Alonso, and David Hildebrandt, who all graduated from the soloist class at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen. As early as 2003, they were the first to explore this instrument combination, attracted by it's many possibilities. Alpha was an immediate success, and have been prize-winners at contests and festivals all over Europe.
In this third volume, Cedric Tiberghien completes his tour of the art of variation in Beethoven and his later avatars. Taking in the experimental daring of Ligeti (Musica ricercata) and the poetic games of Kurtag (Jatekok), this sweeping survey is completed with the Diabelli Variations, the absolute peak of Beethoven's piano music.
Now regarded as one of the world’s leading soloists on his instrument, Pablo Sáinz-Villegas embodies “the soul of the Spanish guitar” and has long been internationally acclaimed as an ambassador of Spanish culture. He is the first guitarist in almost four decades to be invited by the Berliner Philharmoniker to perform in the Berlin Philharmonie, and also the first guitarist within that period to perform at the orchestra’s traditional New Year’s Eve concert. At the end of 2020 he will play Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez under Kirill Petrenko. After some thirty prizes at international competitions and after concerts in over forty countries Pablo Sáinz-Villegas is rightly seen as the worthy successor of the legendary father of the classical guitar, Andrés Segovia. On the Sony Classical label he takes his place in the famous tradition of outstanding guitarists that includes John Williams and Julian Bream.
When supreme virtuosity is coupled with lightness of touch, when passion is combined with melancholy and when the six strings of the guitar vibrate like a single heartbeat, then Pablo Sáinz-Villegas is in his element. For his latest album this exceptional artist has chosen ten works that are especially close to his heart: “Spanish music represents a blend of different influences,” he explains, because “the harmonies, rhythms and melodies of a whole range of folk traditions” come together here. These traditions are not just Arab and Christian but others, too. In the music that has been written for the Spanish guitar, listeners may recognize “the voice of an entire nation”. Here is a language based on “the centuries-old peaceful coexistence of a variety of different cultures”.
“Welcome to my country, which is ready to open its heart to you.” Pablo Sáinz-Villegas’s latest album features some of the best-known works ever written for the guitar. But it is two composers above all who are central to his interest: Francisco Tárrega, who is represented by Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Capricho Árabe, Gran jota de concierto and Lágrima, while Isaac Albéniz’s contributions include Asturias and Mallorca. “I have a particularly close relationship with each of these pieces as they represent a different part of the Spain that I love so much.” Taken together, the works that have been recorded here form nothing more nor less than “the essence and soul of the Spanish guitar”. Among the central sources of inspiration of these works is folk music, notably the jota, a dance that Pablo Sáinz-Villegas often performed in his youth. The Intermezzo from Gerónimo Giménez’s La boda de Luis Alonso constitutes a tribute to the zarzuela, a quintessential Spanish genre that is a synthesis of one-act opera, theatre, drama and comedy.
An exclusive Sony artist, Pablo Sáinz-Villegas was born in Logroño in the La Rioja region of northern Spain. He has given the world premieres of numerous works, including Rounds, the first guitar piece by the Academy Award-winning composer John Williams. In 2018 Pablo Sáinz-Villegas had the privilege of working with Plácido Domingo on a joint album, the successful Volver, leading Domingo to describe him as a true “master of the guitar”. In 2006 Pablo Sáinz-Villegas founded The Legacy of Music Without Borders, a project whose aim is to bring together people in order to encourage a deeper understanding of different cultures. He has already been able to reach over 45,000 children. Pablo Sáinz-Villegas now lives in New York and Madrid.
The Spanish label IBS Classical releases Libro del Frío (Book of Cold), a major work by composer José María Sánchez-Verdú, based on the celebrated poetry collection by Antonio Gamoneda, one of Spain's most influential contemporary poets and winner of the Cervantes Prize. Written for countertenor, organ, orchestra, and five spatialized instrumental groups, Libro del Frío is an immersive sound architecture conceived for the Cathedral of León, where it was premiered in 2008 on the occasion of the 25th International Organ Festival. In this recording, the haunting voice of Carlos Mena finds it's perfect echo in the vast resonances of the sacred space, joined by Óscar Candendo at the organ and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, under the composer's direction. Drawing on the deep musicality of Gamoneda's verse, Sánchez-Verdú creates a unique dialogue between word, space, and sound. His composition unfolds as a seven-part cycle-with interludes and the final organ work Límina-where silence and light become structural elements of the music. The result is an experience that blurs the boundaries between liturgy and abstraction, between human voice and cathedral architecture.
A beautifully programmed collection anchored by the strength of Ragna Schirmer's piano. Clara and Robert Schumann borrow from each other's compositions in the early years of their great love affair in two sets of playfully intimate variations. Twenty years later, the theme is woven anew into two more sets of variations: a revisiting on the theme by Clara Schumann and one by her friend Johannes Brahms. Performing on an original Blu¨thner grand piano of 1856, Ragna Schirmer's long association with the music of both Clara and Robert deepens the sense of rediscovery of these rarely recorded works for the listener.
The great "Eroica" variations are the centerpiece of this program, which ends with two amusingly anglophile tributes, and contains some surprisingly under-appreciated Beethoven. This is an indispensable pendant to Angela Hewitt's ongoing survey of his piano sonatas.
Spanish Classics - Manuel Blasco De Nebra: Complete Keyboard Sonatas Vol 1 / Pedro Casals
Naxos
CD
$19.99Aug 25, 2009
BLASCO DE NEBRA Keyboard Sonatas: Nos. 1– 5; 107–112; in d; in G • Pedro Casals (pn) • NAXOS 8.572068 (76:16)
This is the first of a projected set of three CDs devoted to the extant piano sonatas of Manuel Blasco de Nebra (1750–1784) by pianist and musicologist Pedro Casals. During his short life, Blasco de Nebra is said to have composed some 170 works, though we don’t know in what form nor for what media he wrote. According to Casals’s interesting and informative notes, only 26 keyboard sonatas and six pastorellas are known to survive. Six of the sonatas were apparently published as op. 1, a copy of which is in the Library of Congress. The remainder are known from manuscripts from the Monastery of Montserrat (Catalonia), Encarnación Monastery of Osuna (near Seville), and the Santa Clara Convent (Seville.) Blasco de Nebra was born and died in Seville and, except for two years in Madrid, where his uncle, the zarzuela composer José de Nebra had connections at court, his entire life was spent in the Andalusian city. It may be straddling the fence to call these pieces “keyboard sonatas”: the prominence of Alberti bass figuration alone would seem to argue in favor of the piano. It’s worth noting that one of the more prominent Iberian piano makers, Francisco Pérez Mirabal, flourished in Seville contemporaneously with Blasco de Nebra. Two of Mirabal’s pianos survive. He, like other Iberian makers, had the advantage of basing their instruments on the imported Florentine pianos of Cristofori and Ferrini, unlike Silbermann in Germany, who was forced to experiment on the basis of simplistic published diagrams of the Cristofori action. In any case, it’s obvious from the persuasive performances by Casals (albeit on the modern piano) that Blasco de Nebra’s sonatas are well crafted, often quite beautiful, and never less than effective.
Without being derivative, these pieces bring to mind the Catalan composer, Antonio Soler. Certainly the sonatas of Soler’s master, Domenico Scarlatti, seem a constant point of reference. This recording presents Blasco de Nebra’s sonatas chronologically. The earliest (Nos. 107–112, deriving from the Osuna Encarnación and Santa Clara manuscripts) are cast in single-movement, binary form, like Scarlatti’s. The latest recorded here (Nos. 1–5, from the Montserrat Abbey manuscript) preface each Allegro movement with an extended Adagio. Most of the sonatas unfold in two-part textures; their inventive motivic structure is often triadic and highly ornamented. Blasco de Nebra was active among several organists who played at the cathedral in Seville. It’s not surprising that, in the couple of sonatas that seem to effectively employ tone-painting, church bells are evoked: festal peals in Sonata No. 111, for instance, and in the Adagio of Sonata No 2, somber chimes. Casals brings a rhythmic vitality and crisp touch to his performances, appropriately achieving his varied affects with scarcely any pedal. Given his decision to present the sonatas in the order written, it will be interesting to observe Blasco de Nebra’s stylistic evolution in future releases.
The piano sound (in this case an instrument that could have used a touch-up during the recording) leaves something to be desired, possibly due to overly close microphone placement and a less than resonant space. But the playing is so good and the music so interesting that one quickly forgets the less-than-optimal technical aspects of the recording. Casals’s performances, authoritative and imbued with a love of the music, will no doubt attract greater attention to this little-known but obviously gifted composer. Recommended.
Thibaut Garcia is one of the most acclaimed classical guitarists of his generation, praised for a playing style that combines virtuosity and poetic sensitivity. Born from a deep artistic friendship with guitarist Antoine Morinere, this album offers a fresh take on Bach's masterpiece Goldberg Variations, now reimagined for two guitars. The arrangement, from Garcia and Moriniere themselves, is the result of a full year of work during which, quoting the artists, they focused on "how to adapt the keyboard work for two guitars, while preserving the illusion of a single performer". Twin guitars helped in their artistic endeavour: the album is recorded on two guitars cut from the same tree, and realized especially for the project by French luthier Hugo Cuvillier.
Bach: The Goldberg Variations for Guitar / Kurt Rodarmer
Sony Masterworks
CD
$17.99Aug 06, 2010
It's not just technical achievements that Rodarmer has to offer; he also makes a beautiful sound, at once lustrous and warm, and has an impressive sense of style.
Turning to what Sony bills as a world premiere transcription of the Goldberg Variations for guitar, I was incredulous. Maybe the Goldbergs could be cogently presented, I thought, on the lute, which is an instrument well suited to polyphonic writing, but how could its complex textures be clearly rendered on the essentially harmony-oriented guitar?
Fortunately, it turns out that Kurt Rodarmer (about whom Sony vouchsafes no biographical information) agrees with me. Combining the roles of arranger, performer, and producer, he has made his version for multiple guitars, anything from two to four of them, "recording each part separately and later mixing them down." Naturally there is a certain loss where the virtuoso conquest of technical demands is concerned, but this, as many may feel and as Glenn Gould used to argue passionately, is by no means necessarily a bad thing.
In any case, Rodarmer's dazzling finger skills still make a tremendous impression, especially by virtue of the combination of speed, steadiness, and clarity with which he dispatches such variations as No. 23, with its rapid parallel thirds and whirlwind cadential scales. In variations like Nos. 6, 21, and 24 Bach's canonic writing emerges with unusual lucidity. Nor are such technical achievements all Rodarmer has to offer. He makes a beautiful sound, at once lustrous and warm, that is vividly captured by the very clear sound. He realizes textures like those of the two-manual Variation 20 with a sure feeling for their drama. And he has an impressive sense of style, which is given expression by some elegant long grace notes in the Aria itself and in the 9/8 meter of Variation 24, and also by some well-conceived changes of articulation in the repeats.
These latter, by the way, are omitted in the Aria but included in the variations, with only a few exceptions. The decision to omit the first of the two repeats in Variation 16 but to include the second one seems perverse, since this variation is designed in the form of a French overture, with stately introduction and dancelike fast section, and that is a genre where the tradition of repeating the introduction was surely invariable in Bach's time.
Aside from one or two such minutiae, and from a slightly mechanical feeling in the treatment of the minor-mode Variation 25 (where, perhaps symptomatically, both repeats are ignored), I found both the conception of Rodarmer's arrangement—a refreshing blend of artistic respect with absence of pomposity—highly persuasive. Like Bach on the accordion, I wouldn't want to hear Goldberg on the guitar every time. But I am glad to have both in my collection to indulge in as an occasional and artistically worthwhile treat.
Latin-American Classics - Gianneo: Piano Works Vol 1
Marco Polo
CD
$19.99May 01, 2002
An Argentinian composer of Italian origin, Luis Gianneo is much lesser-known than his slightly younger colleague Alberto Ginastera. His music however clearly paves the way for Ginastera’s in that much of it is, in one way or another, folk-inspired. Many of these pieces actually use Argentinian folk rhythms rather than quote or rhapsodise on folk-tunes, much in the same way as in Bartók’s so-called imaginary folklore. Indeed, Gianneo’s music is never slavishly nationalistic (i.e. in the narrowest meaning of the word) or merely picturesque. It nevertheless is deeply rooted in the local tradition as well as in mid-20th Century musical language. His piano writing is clearly of its time, and often brings Prokofiev, Stravinsky or Bartók to mind.
The Suite of 1933 is the earliest work in this selection and a good example of Gianneo’s musical thinking. It successfully blends folk-like rhythms and phrases with a more cosmopolitan idiom. It is a brilliant piece, full of energy and colourful contrasts.
The Sonatina, completed in Paris in 1938, is much more Neo-classical in outlook though its main themes are again often redolent of folk music. The thematic material is moulded in more traditional forms and handled with much economy and clarity. It never outstays its welcome.
The Piano Sonata No.2 (1943) is a much more ambitious piece, though it has still much in common with the earlier works, especially in its reliance on traditional Neo-classical forms and Argentinian rhythms. In this, as in the earlier pieces, there is much contrapuntal activity which Gianneo expertly masters; but again his colourful music is never blandly academic or dryly austere.
The shorter Improvisación of 1948 is set in a clear ABA form. The gently undulating outer sections frame a more impassioned middle section. A beautiful short piece that should become a popular encore, were it heard more often.
The Piano Sonata No.3, completed in 1957, is another ambitious, substantial piece. It is a much more troubled work than any of the other ones recorded here. According to Dora De Marinis, this may reflect the composer’s sorrow at the death of his wife but also the turbulent political situation of the country at that time. In any case, the music here is rather more austere, harsher, though it still has its share of folk-inspired material. The way in which this material is handled already points towards Gianneo’s later music. This is characterised by a greater economy of resources as is evident in the masterly Seis Bagatelas, written between 1957 and 1959. This is one of his last piano pieces, and, as far as I am concerned, the finest work here. The folk material is less prominent and the counterpoint is in strict two-part writing, whereas the musical idiom now tends towards some free atonality. The music is still very colourful, inventive and superbly written for the instrument.
Gianneo’s attractive piano music is well-served by the present performers and is given a warm, natural piano sound. I for one hope that Volume 2 will soon be released, for, judging by the present recordings, Gianneo’s music greatly deserves to be re-assessed, the more so when it is played, as it is here, by dedicated performers.
Daniel Barenboim served as the Chief Conductor of the Orchestre de Paris from 1975 to 1989, following Charles Munch, Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti, starting the role at the age of 33. His tenure was marked by a strong commitment to both the classical repertoire and contemporary music by composers such as Boulez, Dutilleux, and Henze. Barenboim's collaboration with the orchestra resulted in numerous recordings, including a significant body of French repertoire, many of them originally issued on EMI Classics and Erato.
Spanish Classics - Blancafort: Complete Piano Music Vol 4 / Miquel Villalba
Naxos
CD
$19.99Apr 29, 2008
BLANCAFORT Pastorel-la. American Souvenir. Sonatina antiga. Ermita i panorama. Cavantina i diàleg. Romance, Intermezzo, and March • Miquel Villalba (pn) • NAXOS 8.557335 (64:38)
This is the fourth in a series devoted to the piano music of Catalan composer Manuel Blancafort (1897–1987). His work resembles that of his fellow Catalan Federico Mompou. I hear a similar tough edge to the harmony, stabs of dissonance underpinning the intimate surface, but Blancafort draws on a wider stylistic range, incorporating neo-Classical influences (Sonatina antiga) and often a Debussyan sparkle. A fluency to the writing indicates the composer’s prowess as a pianist, and one or two pieces that wind down in a gradual rallentando remind us that the Blancafort family was in the pianola business.
I have found this disc beguiling, returning to it out of sheer pleasure as much as reviewing necessity. The stately Cavantina and the similarly melancholy Saraband that constitutes the central movement of the Sonatina (Tendresa) reveal a considerable depth of feeling. On a more Impressionistic note, the piece entitled Ermita i panorama (“Hermitage and Panorama,” 1930–31) opens with a folksy theme, sounding like a Hispanic Vaughan Williams, then blossoms into virtuosic activity. With its rippling surface, this could be a newly discovered prelude by Debussy.
American Souvenir (1926–29) consists of two movements. The first was inspired by an Atlantic crossing the composer undertook, where the slow progress of the voyage was punctuated by the distant sounds of bustling activity and the resident American jazz orchestra on board. The second is a tribute to Charlie Chaplin, a screen star who fascinated Blancafort—much as he fascinated the composer’s French contemporary Charles Koechlin. In both these pieces, Blancafort retains his personal voice (as indeed did Koechlin in his own Chaplin tribute, the final movement of the Seven Stars Symphony). There is no mock-ragtime to depict the 1920s; rather the composer has evoked the energy of that era through his own musical language, more a passive observer than participant. A tinge of pathos to the high jinks makes the second piece suitably “Chaplinesque.”
The music covered in this program comes from a six-year period centering on the late 1920s, with the exception of the three-part Romance, Intermezzo, and March, written in 1942. In this suite of pieces, Blancafort has pared back his textures and any French influence has practically disappeared. The result is plainer, closer to Mompou in its concision. Several of these works remain unpublished, including Ermita i panorama and the lilting Pastorel-la that opens the recital.
Pianist Miquel Villalba presents this unfamiliar music with skill and sensitivity; one senses that his heart is in it. The sound is enjoyably warm and clear. In its gentle way, this disc is a winner.
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