The tango is known to have originated in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, a casserole of local and foreign influences, full of brothels, knives, scoundrels and a few broken hearted heroes. Lesser known is the facet it developed later on and out of this context when the tango reached not only the high European saloons but also the ears and minds of some of the XXth century´s most important composers. Seduced perhaps by its apparent sensuality and articulated rhythmic pulsations, some of these composers were inspired enough to write their own tangos. With varied instrumentations, be it piano solo, a chamber ensemble or a symphony orchestra, they brought their own visions of tango and traduced them into their own musical language, one that was immersed in the idiom of the 20th century. Some of these works have been able to stay in the standard repertoire of musicians and ensembles, like the tangos of Albeniz or Stravinsky. However, others (Schnittke, Satie, Milhaud…) have been harder to introduce and remain quite unknown. But, what would happen if we would insert the most representative instrument of tango music into these works: the bandoneon? The result is here in your hands: an album that brings classical music of the 20th century together with progressive and revolutionary tango music of the same era, in the unusual chamber format of bandoneon and piano.
33 Sueños
I conceived 33 Dreams as sort of a strange trip to a supposedly shifting center that can be found both inside and outside consciousness. The dreams here are coded messages that help draw the map, and their poetic translation is the exerted result of their decoding in a precise language of symbols. In the road we find seas, magical places, real and imaginary persons, whirlpools, spirals, monsters, gods, abysses, and a myriad array of both typical and archetypal images found in the quest for my emotional, intellectual and poetic need. Roberto Sierra uses this trip structure, “journey” as he prefers to say (in fact, one third of the piece was composed during a cruise crossing in his Caribbean sea), in order to connect his 33 Dreams with the tradition of the great song cycles of German romanticism. In par with another journey song cycle, Winterreise, the music of 33 Dreams penetrates not only inside the poetic text, but also into its interstices, to achieve a superior level of comprehension in which the daydream acquires reality and reality blurs into daydream; Roberto manages in a prodigious way the capability of the symbolic adaptation of music to enhance the dream, to profile it and to vivify it, in such a way that it acquires another dimension fuller in content, meaning and beauty.
Somewhere I read that Luis Buñuel, at the premiere of his film L’ÂGE D’OR went up to the stage and said: “this is my film L’ÂGE D’OR, if you think it’s strange, life is much more strange”. “Music for a Liquid Theater” (2018) As in many other works of mine, musical space is developed as an inportant aspect of composition; when performed in a concert hall, some instruments have a special dispositon, violin is in the left corner and violoncello in the right corner of the stage, while flute and clarinet play from the other corners behind the audience. Abreviaturas (1999), is a very special work for me, with no dynamics –the whole work in pianissimo-, no effects, almost no timbre, only duration and pitch (rhythms and notes). “Música para contemplar la evolución de una ola a cámara lenta” (2012), as strange as it may seem, the title -Music for contemplating the evolution of a wave in slow motion- came to me as I was watching a documentary on tv; there was a fantastic image of a wave from the inside moving in slow motion, like a living sculpture made of soft glass. “La Memoria del Agua” (1995), On the days I was working on both pieces, I remember the deep impression that I received from the Ives Klein retrospective at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.
Pedro Pablo Cámara Toldos
Camilla Köhnken
What is it that makes a concert an inspiring experience for the listener?
This was the initial question in the process of planning this debut CD of the IVORY & REED. Obviously there are several possible ways towards this goal but the most appealing one for this project seemed to be offering a broad versatility in musical styles and thereby different ways of expression in a concert program setting. The result is a multifaceted journey from Schumann’s songlike ‘Romances’ through the neo-Baroque Hindemith sonata to the late-romantic virtuoso piece by Desenclos up to the epic violin sonata by Franck. To hear traditional repertoire like Schumann or Franck in this instrumental combination might seem far-fetched at first but piano and saxophone turn out to be great partners not only for original repertoire but also in casting new light on all-too-known pieces–the two timbres compliment each other exceptionally well and provide an ear-opening experience.
If the Piezas Íntimas were for me the concentrated version of Roberto’s language, the Aphorisms are 28 fragments that live up to their name, each of them being a short sentence proposing what for me are Roberto’s compositional principles in their purest and most concise version – each of them exploring the dynamic and sonic range of the instrument in a matter of seconds. His Sonatas, as I began to study them, opened me up to a world full of completely fresh sonorities, structures and approaches. The Sonatas span a world from Central Europe, where their structure strengthens in the second half of the 18th century, to the region of Latin America and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries, where sonata movements contained Afro-Caribbean elements linked to sudden appearances of elements as different from each other as flamenco, salsa, pasodoble or tango, followed by slow movements that seem like improvisations (despite the exactness with which they have been written), filled with nocturnal music, an aria da capo that loses its original rhythm and becomes “out of balance”.
Ana Alonso
The title chosen for this document, ALTO MYSTIC, reflects what the violist Ana María Alonso and the IBS-CLASSICAL label wanted to suggest as the universe enclosed in an instrument full of secrets such as the viola, an instrument that has transcended from the orchestral ripieno scene to a solo virtuosity in a relatively short time. The accurate reference to the etymological origin of the term (from the Greek mystikós whose first meaning is about something arcane and mysterious) not only reveals the intention of discovering the timbre and expressive effects of the viola but to inducing composers to penetrate into their mysterious world through the works composed for this occasion. In this sense, interpreter and composers have achieved their purpose, without a doubt; Ana María Alonso discovering the subtleties of the viola´s timbre through a technical and expressive refinement of the highest instrumental conception, and the ten composers, each from their creativity, constructing an enriching musical poetic discourse, not only for the violistic repertoire, but for the music itself.
Claudio Constantini
Towards the end of the 19th century, two great cosmopolitan cities developed with identical characteristics in opposite corners of the vast American continent. In these cities, two characteristically urban musical genres were born produced by the melting pot of European immigrants, creoles, African slaves and people native to the land. When jazz (which emerged from European salon music together with ragtime rhythms, blues and spirituals) arrived to New York, it met indigenous melodies, religious chants, Anglo-Celtic ballads and cowboy songs from the old west, all of which would sum up the essence of North American music. On the other hand, in Buenos Aires (which had recently been elected as the capital city of Argentina), a style of danceable song was born in which one can trace influences coming from Andalutian flamenco, south Italian melodies, Cuban habanera, candombe and African percussion, Spanish contradanza and the milonga or the rural music from Argentina.
Miren Urbieta
Ruben Fernández Aguirre
The stunning economic development of the Basque Country after the end of the last Carlist War (1876) turned into an artistic flowering almost without precedent in the first decades of the 20th Century. Music, particularly, was promoted as an identifying attribute and a tool for civic progress. In a context of advanced “globalisation” of the Western culture, a constellation of local authors aspired to measure themselves on equal terms with their European counterparts, although without giving up neither their own personality nor their vernacular roots. Nevertheless, each of them faced such a challenge depending on their particular circumstance, sensitivity and idiosyncrasy.
AMICITIA
Luis de Pablo’s compositional output is tremendously attractive – for accordionists as well – in view of its outstanding originality and quality. It is also entirely different from the remaining contemporary repertoire for accordion: de Pablo’s particularly expressive musical vocabulary is perfectly tuned to the dynamic capacities of the accordion bellows, as well as to the instrument’s wide range of sonorities and extended performance options. We all agreed that an original work by a great master such as Luis de Pablo would make a valuable contribution to accordion repertoire. Iñaki Alberdi has collaborated closely with different current composers, and premiered work by Sofia Gubaidulina, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luis de Pablo, Joan Guinjoan, Gabriel Erkoreka, Ramon Lazkano, Jesús Torres, Agustín Charles and José María Sánchez-Verdú.
Alfred Brendel
This CD contains, firstly, the lecture given by Alfred Brendel during his London residence on the 12th of April 2016, recorded by Francisco Moya with Juan Carlos Garvayo as a producer. Secondly, Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, in Brendel’s legendary 1958 recording for Vox Records. And finally, my piece Ancora un segreto, Hommage-Sonate per Alfred Brendel, recorded on 21 December 2015 at the Manuel de Falla Auditorium in Granada by Juan Carlos Garvayo. A recording which I contributed to with the keenest critical listening possible, during the preparatory sessions by our Granadian pianist. (Mauricio Sotelo, composer)
The double bass is the instrument through which I express myself in its purest form. I feel that creating this album is my way of expressing gratitude to it. It is essential for me that everything has meaning. By taking the sonata form as the guiding thread for the album, I have meticulously assembled the pieces, as if they were a puzzle.Each of the works holds great significance for me, representing an important part of my relationship with music. The sonata is the structural form that has been widely used in European classical music since the mid-eighteenth century. Therefore, given that Johannes Brahms, especially his sonatas for violin and piano, has had the most significant impact on my musical life, I wanted to pay him a small tribute.
Angel Barja Songs
This recording has selected almost all of the piano-voice songs by Ángel Barja, based on ancient Galician folklore, where the melody tames a very accomplished popular style, slenderised in a subtle and coloristic piano accompaniment that scrupulously observes the conventions of popular roots voice writing. Barja preserves the syllabic nature of the melodies and insists on maintaining the accentuations against the verse. He alternates in them the strophic song, with turns and repetitions, with the simplicity of the popular tune, in many cases with medieval roots, as happens in the Cantiga “Those who know how to love” («Cuantas savedes amar») with a 13th century melody. Another bloc groups exuberant Christmas songs and, last, a third group, very eclectic, assembles songs of different styles and subjects. The poetic anthology used by Barja in his songs is very successful regarding the rhythm and musicality of these verses. It is no coincidence that, despite the apparent aesthetical and geographical remoteness of Galicia and Granada, our composer chose Federico García Lorca to compose five of his songs. José María Pemán was the poet chosen by the composer to set two of his most beautiful and brilliant songs: “Lemons carries the river” («Limones van por el río»), title of this CD production. This sample of the best of his legacy clearly pretends to showcase his music, his talent as melody composer and his mastery to combine sonorities and tradition.
Eneko Vadillo
We could say that Eneko Vadillo (Malaga, 1973), would embody a third very peculiar wave called neo-spectralist and eclectic. This is due to biographical and professional reasons, including his time at the Royal College of Music in London where he worked with Magnus Lindberg, Julian Anderson, George Benjamin and Jonathan Harvey between 2001 and 2004 and at the IRCAM during the 2008-2009 academic year. Beyond their possible uselessness when trying to name and delimit a compositional position which is always dynamic and in progress, these terms can help us to describe Vadillo’s attitude to sound and composition, as shown by the pieces making up this record.
This album allows us to appreciate the versatility of the young performer Anna Urpina, whose goal has been to approach each score from a historically informed perspective. The compositions of c. XVII and XVIII (Castello, Biber, Corelli and Telemann) are recorded with Baroque violin (with gut strings) and bow next to the harpsichord. In addition, the tuning is half a tone lower (415 Hz) than is usually used in the current repertoire (442 Hz).
Joaquín Clerch
To the south of Madrid, on the way to Andalusia, stands the Royal Palace of Aranjuez, a city of Italian inspiration built in the sixteenth century by King Felipe II, and kept as Spring Royal Residence until 1870. Significant events in the history of Spain occurred here, such as the abdication of Carlos IV in favour of his son Fernando VII. During all that time, gardens and tree-lined streets continued to be added, to the point where Aranjuez represents the perfection of Nature, ordered by man. It is hardly a surprise that when Joaquín Rodrigo (1902-1999), the sightless composer trained in Paris, visited the Royal Seat in 1933 on his honeymoon, he should be captivated by the fragrance of magnolias, the song of the birds and the splash of the fountains.
Xianji Liu
RTVE Orchestra
In May 2016, I went to the Royal Palace of Aranjuez right after I was awarded the best interpretation of Joaquin Rodrigo Concertos (Special Award to the best interpretation of Fantasia para Gentilhombre granted by the Victoria and Joaquin Rodrigo Foundation). I was walking along the palace when the most ecstatic part of Concierto de Aranjuez came to my mind. I tried following the footprints of Joaquin, feeling what he might have felt at his time, experiencing a combination of Spanish historical architectures and classical music, and dreaming about playing the famous concerto at this very place someday. Joaquin Rodrigo completed his greatest masterpiece “Concierto de Aranjuez” in 1939 in Madrid, which brought him great fame as one of the greatest representatives in Spanish music spectrum, along with I. Albeniz, E. Granados, M. Falla, J. Turina. And his works helped raise the classical guitar to a historic high recognition. The two concertos in the album mean quite differently to me. It was through performing Fantasia para un Gentilhombre that I further understood Joaquin Rodrigo, as a performer myself for the first time.
Harmoniously united, music and literature were combined throughout Argentina’s cultural history on numerous occasions. A wide repertoire of vocal compositions was configured in the format of chamber song with piano and, as such, participated in the formation of identities –national, regional, local– strengthening the relationship between culture and society. Whether as single pieces or grouped in the form of real cycles, it is an extensive corpus that still remains almost unexplored, were it not for contributions such as the one present, characterized by an avoidance of the commonplaces of conventional discography.
Numen Ensemble
The SONG OF SONGS finds one of its most effective means of representation and expression in the polyphonic music of the Renaissance. audi, audi comprises some examples of masterpieces from the age, of varied origins and in general rarely recorded and performed, and hopes to contribute to spreading the appreciation for this refined, intense and expressive compositions.
Azumi Nishizawa
Fascinating journey through the music that unites Debussy with Spanish composers. Places are sounds: Granada. The city was a recurring source of inspiration for Debussy, and yet the composer never visited it; his knowledge of it was gained only indirectly through literary accounts, images, and musical sources heard in Paris. All of these materials served to unleash his imagination in regard to its sound, which according to Falla represented ‘the truth without authenticity, as not a single note is borrowed from Spanish folklore and yet, even in its smallest details, it wonderfully expresses Spain’. A common element links all the composers in the present program: the city of Paris. From the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the French capital was a fundamental goal for many Spanish composers, who at some point in their lives went there for study or work purposes.
Bacarisse Conciertos
When the Civil War begins, Bacarisse follows the Republican government to Valencia and, shortly before the definitive triumph of the Francoist troops, crosses the Pyrenees on foot with his family. Finally settled in Paris, Bacarisse writes three-quarters of his production there in virtually every genre until his death in 1963, whilst working as an editor on Radio Paris (Radio France broadcasts in Spanish). As an emblematic work of these years, his Concertino for guitar (1952), op. 72a, may be recalled. With its tonal language, relatively conventional form, and adherence to musical twists traditionally associated with Spanish musical nationalism, it would probably never incite the scandals caused by Bacarisse’s earlier works. Without wishing to deny that Bacarisse´s renegade impulse could have been reduced by the transfer to a musical environment that was not his own and in which his artistic and political positions would cause less scandal and interest than in the Madrid of the 1920s and 30s, in this essay I seek, by examining the three works included on this CD, connections between the work of Bacarisse prior to and during the exile that nuance the trope of Bacarisse as frustrated composer.
Juan Carlos Garvayo, piano Cecilia Bercovich, violin José Miguel Gómez, cello Orquesta Filarmónica de Málaga José Luis Estellés, conductor
BACH Cello Suites
Asier Polo
J. S. Bach’s Cello Suites are somehow hypnotic. An austere work, an instrument, a performer, a single voice and yet we begin to listen to them and are introduced into a path which inevitably leads us inwards, and makes us aware of our absolute solitude facing the universe and the unknown. When we approach a work of such dimensions, turn out to be hopelessly small, aware of the responsibility implied by being alone before a musical monument of almost unrivalled characteristics. The work places you in front of the mirror, with no frills to hide your true vulnerability as an artist. I had to be honest and consistent with my journey. I knew I could not offer something definitive, but I had to capture the photograph of a moment, an instant of my journey as a musician in the continuous search for something that, due to its greatness, is infinite. The greatness of this music is manifested through a message of profound humanism, which opens our minds to the beautiful, the intangible, and the elevated.
MdL – Facundo Agudin
In this album, the cantatas BWV 170 and BWV 82 are hailed by two transcriptions: two polyphonic works by Josquin Desprez and William Byrd appear here in the manner of two ancient Bach “faces”. Heaven appears here as a territory of inspiration, a realm of Contented peace, beloved delight of the soul (BWV 170). These four works reflect in one inspirational mirror: the topic of the final departure and the farewell to the departed Master. This vision of the Hereafter provides a space of harmony in which both cantatas connect, as an echo of the mysterious scene of the presentation of Jesus in the temple. Bach Mirror does not address a particular type of audience. Together with Orchestre Musique des Lumières and IBS Classical, we aimed to renew our own views on diferent landscapes of the “grand répertoire”. Our reading simply intends to appeal to any curious music lover.
Sei Solo is a proposal including not only the performance of the composer’s original music, but also the contributions offered by the researcher Helga Thoene which are based on the discovery of the possible existence, among some of the movements, of chorales by the composer himself. For this, she has counted on the collaboration of the soprano Manon Chauvin, the countertenor Gabriel Díaz, the tenor Fran Braojos, the bass Simón Millán and the cellist Marco Pannaría. The delicate textures of the vocal registers, combined with the solemnity of the cello, represent a perfect complement for this original purpose.
Antonio Torres & Louiza Hamadi
Double bass & Piano Duo
Each person makes their own path, their own journey through the sensations. This is my own way and here the dream I have always had is fulfilled, to record a double bass solo disc. There is nothing that makes me happier than to be able to share it with all of those who will listen to it. In this recording I want to express everything I feel whenever I can enjoy the musical instrument I love the most; the double bass. (Antonio Torres)
Asier Polo & Eldar Nebolsin
Thus, the music of Brahms, regardless of tastes, trends or aesthetic currents, is already part of the whisper of history. It does not need defenders, it does not concern detractors. It just stays. This recording that is presented here breathes nobility. Nobility in the message of Brahms’s work and nobility in an interpretation that also starts from an absolute devotion to the music of two performers in a moment of full artistic maturity. There are no hesitations here either, the ideas are clearly and emphatically exposed, everything emerges and develops as if there were no other possibility of interpretation. Pure music that demands a total surrender and that parts from the deep knowledge of the Brahmsian language that the interpreters display at all times.
Brahms Clarinet Works
It is clear and undisputed that the Sonatas belong to the outstanding clarinet music-literature. Brahms succeeds in his two “Sister Sonatas” to show the full sonority of the woodwind instrument while treating the piano as an accompaniment, but equal chamber music partner. Clarinet and piano always stay together – in support and in dialogue. The composition in all of these works can be experienced as a contribution to any understanding of expression and inter-musical relationships: this becomes clear on an inter-musical level of the composition and on an inter-humane level of the interpreters. It is especially this aspect which makes Brahms still experienceable in performance and interpretable today. In this ‘performativity’, the works experience their raison d’être; and in their performance, the intimate dialogue of friendship becomes reality. What has been described as sweet and cooperative music-making as well as a deep sound of sensitivity by the clarinet in the sonatas can also be found in Brahms’ Trio a few years earlier. The composer took advantage of the understated partnership of violoncello, clarinet and piano and merged them into a trio in A- minor: “It’s as if the instruments loved each other”.
The Brahms vocal compositions (for their quality and abundance – over 400 of them) made Brahms a “worthy heir to Beethoven” in Germany, throughout Europe, and finally in France, where Ravel was the first and one of the few to admire “the beauty in his melodic ideas, their quality of expression and above all the brilliance of his orchestral language”. Schoenberg also later praised the innovation of his musical language in his Style and Idea.
The excellence of Brahms’ work was summed up by Joseph Joachim, the celebrated Hungarian violinist, composer and conductor who worked with Brahms, and who described his music as “pure as a diamond, soft as the snow”. Schumann also praised the serenity and optimism of the tone with which Brahms ended his most sombre and tormented pieces: “Over choppy waves finally a rainbow shimmers, as the nightingale’s song accompanies the capricious flight of the butterfly”.
This album compiles some of the most important vocal & orchestral works that best define the German composer.
BOOKLET:
The Sonata No.1 for Violin and Piano in G Major, Op. 78 can be heard as a compendium of the characteristics of Brahms’s very personal embodiment of Romanticism: it combines sweet lyricism, restrained expressivity, and emotional urgency. Brahms’s second Sonata for this medium was composed in the summer of 1886 while vacationing in the Bernese Oberland. The Sonata was published as Op. 100, sandwiched between two other major chamber works, the Cello and Piano Sonata in F Major, Op. 99, and the Piano Trio in C Minor, Op. 101. In the Sonata no. 3 in D Minor, Op. 108, Brahms achieved a maximum level of economy of means. Unlike the preceding two sonatas, the third has four movements instead of three, yet the highly concentrated approach taken by the composer makes it rather short, about 20 minutes in total. Composed between 1886 and 1888, it was dedicated to Brahms’s champion Hans von Bülow, a friend and colleague who had once been a staunch supporter of Wagner—before they fell out and became enemies.
Ricardo Gallén
We are facing the first recording of complete Guitar Sonatas of Leo Brouwer, the most important guitar music composer of the modern era. In his music in general and in his Sonatas for Guitar in particular, tradition is intermingled with the latest stylistic and intellectual tendencies and is not limited only to what is erroneously called “refined music”. The different cultures -from the most tribal to the most elitist ones-, political-social phenomena, religions, the arts in any of their manifestations as well as the same human thought and feeling inspire and feed the Master’s sound world. Consequently, the challenge of recording his Sonatas for Guitar was not so much in the quantity or difficulty of his music, but in trying to show that Ethos originating from his music.
La Tempestad – Silvia Márquez
Chamber music is traditionally associated with music for a small group of instruments. However, in the past the Royal Chamber welcomed a wide variety of both vocal and instrumental repertoires, as well as devotional music. In the palaces of the Spanish royal family the rooms of the kings and infants had ample dimensions, which made possible the attendance of a large group of musicians and listeners. This album brings together pieces linked to the musical activity of the Spanish court and specifically reflects the variety of repertoire that could be heard in the Royal Chamber during the times of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII. The pieces chosen for this album are vocal and instrumental works that sounded in the chamber of the kings and were composed by Gaetano Brunetti, Francisco Brunetti and José Lidón, renowned composers in the service of the court who had great acknowledgement at that time, and who deserve to be listened to and enjoyed by all fans who will be captivated by their exceptional quality.
BRUNETTI OBOE SEXTET
Opposing the deprecatory view of a backward and isolated Spain that has prevailed until recently, Brunetti’s music shows that what was composed in the rest of Europe was widely and intensely welcomed in Madrid. Cayetano Brunetti was born around 1744 in Fano, a city located on the Adriatic coast. We know that in 1760, aged 15 or 16, he already lived in Madrid with his parents. Due to their unusual instrumentation, the six “Sestetti a due violini, oboe, due viole e violoncello” stand out within Brunetti’s work. According to the manuscript scores, the sextets were composed “per divertimento di S.M.C” (for the amusement of His Catholic Majesty), which means that they were originally written for the concerts that the musicians of the Royal Chamber would perform for Carlos IV. Lightness, emotion, brilliance, and complexity is what gives these sextets their peculiar beauty, which is hardly found in chamber music written during the second half of the 18th century. World premiere recording
Mariola Cantarero Rubén Fernández Aguirre
The heart of La Alhambra is filled with music. Entry to its palaces is astonishing, with the Patio de los Arrayanes, a magic space in which all our senses are enraptured by the rhythm of the arches, the stylised columns and the geometry of the decoration. In the great central pool, the guitar-shaped fountains succeed in extracting a huge variety of qualities and lights from the water while keeping at one the movement of the stream from the basin and the quiet of the mirror in the pool.
Orquesta Sinfónica de Las Palmas
This is a CD of celebration, of encounter, which aims to give universal meaning to the island identity, which has been worked with care, delicacy, heart and rigour. With this album, our beloved orchestra celebrates its twentieth birthday and has chosen the path of rereading old melodies of folklore and folk song. They contain a review of genres and songs that keep all their freshness, but seasoned with curious arrangements, melodic and rhythmic turns that give a new aesthetic value to our popular musical heritage. In the Canary Islands it is not new that classical musicians are interested in folklore. We all remember the work of Power and his Canarian Songs, which are a symbol of the Canarian identity. However, he was not the only one of his time to approach the Canarian tradition in order to adapt it to the symphonic language. Less well known, but just as important is the figure of Bernardino Valle, who bequeathed us an exquisite review of Canarian airs in his work.
CARLOS ALVAREZ, baritone RUBEN FERNÁNDEZ-AGUIRRE, piano
Great live recital of Carlos Alvarez (bariton) and Rubén Fernández Aguirre (piano) in La Monnaie/De Munt (Bruxels). A superb representation of the Spanish lyrics music: Popular songs of Garcia Lorca, Michael Ortega songs on Garcia Lorca poetry. Also the most popular Spanish Zarzuela Arias of Penella, Soutullo, etc.
In the fifty songs we find in Carneriana, so carefully interpreted, David Alegret and Rubén Fernández Aguirre invites us dive into a poetic and musical universe that reveres life, that celebrates existence, and that expresses the beauty in the world look for sonorities, contrasts, and harmonies that can be reflected in song. What better answer than Carner’s poetry, Alegret’s placid, rigorous singing, and Fernández Aguirre’s wise pianism. And yet, the tenor and pianist did not settle for the more or less typical and predictable formulas, such as the Carnerian songs by Toldrà (which already play their own integral part), but also with living authors, to whom ad hoc compositions were requested for the production of this record. The music gathered in this album, which sings Carner’s poetry, allows us to be free and to be masters of ourselves and our time.
Asier Polo Cello Concertos
This CD covers approximately five decades of literature for violoncello and orchestra. The fifty years between the two concertos by Vivaldi (ca. 1720), Haydn (ca. 1763) and Boccherini (publ. 1770). The Concerto for violoncello and strings in C minor RV 401 by Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) is a beautiful and enigmatic work. The autograph is written on an unusual type of paper, and virtually all the features of the document stand out from the rest of the 27 concerts for cello written by the Venetian author. Its dating around 1720 is still a hypothesis, as well as its purpose. What relationship could there be between the Concerto in C major Hob VIIb 1 by Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), a work written around 1763 in his secluded residence of Eisenstadt (about 60 km. from Vienna), and the Concerto in D major G. 479 by Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), edited in 1770 in Paris by a composer who was already living in Spain serving as a chamber musician and composer to the Infante Don Luis de Borbón? Unexpectedly more than we could imagine…
Cerdanyenca takes its title from the eponymous sonata, written by Catalan composer Marc Migo Cortes, who dedicated this masterwork to Prihodko, his great friend. Conceived at the Juilliard School in New York, where Prihodko held the prestigious Kovner Fellowship while completing his Bachelor’s Degree in the studio of Richard Aaron, and Migo Cortes was completing his Ph.D. in the studio of John Corigliano, Sonata Cerdanyenca continues the tradition of the grandiose twentieth-century masterworks for cello and piano. Cultivating the lifetime synergy between composer and cellist, Prihodko and Migo specifically drew inspiration from the artistic collaborations between Rostropovich and Britten, and Piatigorsky and Strauss. The newly commissioned and internationally premiered Sonata has won the prestigious Pau Casals Festival International Award in 2019. In this extremely demanding monumental piece, the composer portrays the legends of his home region of La Cerdanya, from the tales of La dona d’aigua (the seducing water-woman) to the echoing Sardana Dances of Catalonia. His use of folkloric elements contextualizes hundreds of years of storytelling in an engaging acoustical play, expertly guided by Korolionok and Prihodko.
Silvia Márquez
Chaconnerie is a recording that deals with repetition. Chaconnerie illustrates that particular principle of Art that seeks to combine elements over and over again to achieve balance and unity. Chaconnerie encourages us to undertake a voyage in which sounds –through the centuries– build upon an insistently repeated, or imaginatively varied, scheme. Repetition has been a major element of humankind’s artistic manifestations and expressions ever since the time of the moais on Easter Island up to the drawings of Max C. Escher. Repetition is rhythm, pulse, and life, and life overflows in the chaconne, a dance whose origin Lope de Vega attributed to the American Indian (“from the Indies to Seville / it has come by post”) and whose character Miguel de Cervantes describes as lascivious and immoral. With its accent on the second beat and its variations on a harmonic scheme, this dancing base – together with sarabandes, folias, and passacaglias – was conducive to improvisation on chordal progressions, a novelty that had a crucial impact on Baroque music in Europe.
La Danserye
In 1614, Alonso de Bonilla y Garzón (ca. 1570-1635), a poet from Baeza (Jaén), published his first great literary anthology, Peregrinos pensamientos de misterios divinos en varios versos y glosas dificultosas (Peregrine Thoughts of Divine Mysteries in Varied Verses and Difficult Glosses), printed by Pedro de la Cuesta. This thick book, which includes 688 poems, constitutes one of the earliest and more complete examples of the literary style known as conceptismo (concept poetry). This is reflected in its title, in which peregrino is synonymous with the weird and strange, with the veiled and ingenious, and with that which can be interpreted in a variety of ways or has inexact meaning. Despite a lack of knowledge about him today, Bonilla was one of the forefathers of conceptismo, a literary movement that established a witty association between words and ideas known as “concept” or agudeza. His mastery was already praised in his own time by Lope de Vega. However, even Bonilla himself might not have expected that in the same year of the edition of his book, the creole composer Gaspar Fernández (1563/71-1629) would write music to some of his poems to be sung at Puebla Cathedral (Mexico), where he worked as the chapel master, on Christmas Eve 1614. This monographic recording offers for the first time the texts written by Bonilla that were set to music by Fernández for performance at Puebla Cathedral, in a variety of vocal and instrumental combinations according to the practice of that period.
Simon Gollo & John Novacek
Written between 1889 and 1891, the Concert is unique in the chamber music repertoire—scored for solo violin and piano with string quartet. Chausson entitled it Concert (French for concerto) rather than “Sextet,” but the work lies somewhere between a double concerto, in which the two solo instruments are pitted against an entire orchestra, and a sextet, in which all the instruments are more or less equal. Chausson dedicated the Concert to Eugène Ysaÿe, who played the solo violin part at the premiere in Brussels on March 4, 1892. The Crickboom Quartet played the remaining string parts, and Auguste Pierret, the pianist. The artists on this CD perform at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall (New York), Cadogan Hall (London), 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall (New York), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Bolívar Hall (London), Teatro Teresa Carreño (Caracas), Auditorio Blas Galindo (México, DF), Auditorio Manuel de Falla, (Granada), the Teatro Mayor (Bogotá), and for renowned organizations such as the BBC Proms Festival, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Chamber Music Society of Detroit.
Orquesta Barroca Granada
During this recording, work from the two phases of the English period of Händel is introduced, a period which we can define with the title of the aria from the opera Tamerlano which closes the recording: “Heaven and earth.” Therefore in the CD music from the “celestial” genre has been recompiled but also from the “earthly” genre such as opera. Nonetheless, “Heaven and earth” is usually much closer than it seems, since Händel did not create his oratorios for the church, but to represent them in the theatre and provide fun for the aristocrats and bourgeoisie who were thirsty for new sensations. Furthermore, the aria “Heaven and earth” belongs to the first opera which gives the story a relevant role and main part to the voice of the tenor (the important figure Bayaceto, the Turkish sultan prisoner from Tamerlano), when until then the important heroes of the serious genre would have been presented by castrati. This is the other characteristic of the recording: recompiling diverse numbers of operas and oratorios which have the voice of the tenor as the protagonist, an infrequent frame of mind included in the production by the composer who directed it for the first time for the main parts.
Sabina Puértolas and Rubén Fernández Aguirre, through their masterly interpretation of six Italian and six Spanish songs, immerse us in the seductive plasticity of the two-faced sound universe of the Navarrese composer Emilio Arrieta, a member of the “bella armata armonica” (beautiful harmonic army) – using Donizetti’s words – trained in the 1940s at the Milan Conservatory, who cultivated his instinct in the paradise of La Scala Theatre. Let us be captivated by the beauty of this repertoire, of immense quality and interest, which returns to the music stands of the 21st century, thus revealing part of our past. Los Cisnes en Palacio (Swans in the palace) by Alberto García Demestres, draws from many musical sources, both popular and cultured, from a viewpoint and use of contemporary tools in favour of the lyricism of sound and the emotive understanding of phrasing. It is, of course, a work of great difficulty. This tour de force is made up of cadences/moan, acuti and sovracuti senza tetto, a wide palette of colours and emotions.
Clarines de Batalla
The music selected for this recording is from the Spanish Baroque repertoire compiled by the Franciscan priest, organist, composer and collector of music Antonio Martín y Coll (1660-1734) in various books published at the beginning of the eighteenth century, specifically between 1706 and 1709. Although this musicwas originally composed to be played by organists, a substantial part was in fact influenced, in compositional terms, by the prevailing performance style of the time that employed clarines the name given to the trumpets played in the upper registers, also known as the clarin register. Early evidence points to their use on solemn occasions thanks to the brilliance of their sound.
José Luis Estellés
Joussia Quartet
It has been common in the history of recording to combine the quintets for clarinet and strings by Mozart and Weber on a CD. Hardly surprising, as these two works represent the historical establishment of this instrumental combination as a chamber music archetype, used by other concurrent composers in their time and endorsed in successive epochs by such figures as Brahms, Reger, Hindemith, and so down to the most notable of today’s creators. But there are other reasons.
Antonio Salguero
Pedro Gavilán
A journey through the most important sonatas written in the 20th century with the clarinet as the protagonist, by five great composers. The Argentine composer Carlos Guastavino (1912-2000), Joseph Horovitz (1926), Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), and Edison Denissow (1929-1996).
Joaquin Clerch
ETUDES is the best colecttion of technical work written for guitar: The 42 Guitar Studes from Heitor Villalobos and Leo Brouwer. After more than 30 years of work, the great guitarist Joaquin Clerch, offers a masterful guitar playing of this music. Also, as a professor in the Robert Schumann Hochschule of Düseldorf, Clerch offers a masterclass in the CD booklet about how to play these works: 30 pages with explanations, fingerings, positions, photographs,… Joaquín Clerch is an uncommonly gifted musician. In ETUDES, his playing is technically outstanding and highly poetic, and his intellectual capacity for understanding the problems of early music performance is extraordinary. Nikolaus Harnoncourt
This recording should be seen in that manner: as a beginning, a solo recording debut by Alejandro Algarra in which he confronts two colossi of the instrument. It is quite a recording milestone to tackle these two essentials. A real challenge both for him as a performer and for IBS Classical as a record label. So please do not be deceived by the apparent simplicity and unpretentiousness of the term prelude. Quite the opposite, in fact. Nor should a prelude be understood in this case as a prolegomenon to a major piece (“Preludes to what?”, as André Gide wondered in his famous Notes sur Chopin), but as individual works which, taken as a whole, represent a major technical and interpretative challenge; undoubtedly one of the all-time highs of piano literature.
PEDRO PABLO CÁMARA TOLDOS
I MUSICI DI BASILEA
The present work is a homage to saxophone and everything that it means as an instrument, it is a tribute to everything related to it, from its origins to its performers and lovers. Those musicians who with the task of broadcasting, research, teaching, development of techniques, language, etc. have generated a corpus of original works of great interest to us their heirs. The result of that search is the four works presented in this album, in my opinion, the best examples of original music dedicated to the saxophone until the 50s of the last century, a privilege it shares with Sonata by Paul Hindemith, the saxophone quartet by Alexander Glazunov, the Op. 22 by Anton Webern and Légende opus 66 by Florent Schmitt. It interest me very much as saxophonist the possibility to offer music at the highest quality, it is the first reason why I choose this program of original music for saxophone.
Trio Musicalis
The pieces contained in this cd are not only the result of ten years work and their own matured performative proposal but also the challenge of approaching the 5 “essential” pieces of the violin, clarinet and piano repertoire. Of course, we could talk of other widely interpreted pieces of great artistic value, but their authorship (5 big names of the 20th century music) give us credit on this selection. It is also of great interest the fact that, even thou the 5 pieces where composed only 20 years apart (between 1919 and 1938, the inter-war period) they correspond with 5 completely different styles, serving as a wonderful summary of what happened in the history of art during that period..
Numen Ensemble
A selection of the polyphonic works of Juan-Alfonso García, considered the major twentieth century Spanish choral composer, on poems by contemporary Andalusian writers. Numen Ensemble offers an exceptional, unprecedented interpretation of this repertoire. Once Juan-Alfonso García settled in Granada in 1946,a copious choral output came to enrich the Spanish repertoire of the second half of the twentieth century so that, not just because of the amount but also because of the great quality and artistic honesty of his works, he can be said to be the major Spanish choral composer of the time. Leaving his symphonic-choral output to one side, and his religious works in general and liturgical music in particular, this CD looks to the texts of top-flight poets, very frequently Andalusian, sometimes even from his own artistic circle, who drew his attention. Of them, Numen Ensemble has focused on the particularly relevant twentieth century poets Juan Ramo?n Jiménez, Antonio Machado, Federico Garci?a Lorca, Elena Martín Vivaldi and Antonio Carvajal.
MdL – Facundo Agudin
Rocamadour, composed by Pablo Ortiz (1956) opens up an aesthetical enigma for the listener: the letter from La Maga (Rayuela, 1963) inspires an orchestral fantasy, abstract and virtuosic, stylistically akin to minimal music but strongly anchored in a disquieting, dark rhythmic obstinacy, close to Uruguayan candombe. La noche boca arriba, by Julio Viera (1943) is technically a melodrama: an orchestral composition that includes a narrative, meticulously rendered in the score. In our production, the text materializes in the voice of Lisandro Abadie, and Marcelo Nisinman is in charge of the subtle bandoneon part. The piece includes almost the totality of the original story. Viera’s colorful palette projects itself on every scene: the motorcycle on the damp Paris pavement, the accident, the repeated losses of consciousness at the hospital, the violent moves in the rainforest. Every instant is subtly and vividly described in an almost film-like language. Tercera Generación, by Marcelo Nisinman (1970) was inspired by a brief and powerful text, published in Último Round (1969). The piece is marked by a powerful rhythmic force. Nisinman writes without prejudice: one can sense Mahler’s stare hiding behind a dense tango-smoke.
Carlos Mena & Iñaki Alberdi
Accordionists and countertenors are thus a very specific type of musicians. They need to build up their repertoire in the present day, while investigating their respective instrument’s possibilities and potential relevance for interpreting repertoire from the past. And what better testimony of that vocation and that endeavor could one have than this current CD release? Alberdi and Mena started investigating their collaborative potential in a programme that paired the music of Tomás Luis de Victoria with Johann Sebastian Bach (and which still finds its echo in this disc’s culmination, an extraordinary version of Bach’s Chaconne). In a second phase, the two musicians aimed to extend the timespan of their repertoire by confronting the music of Josquin Desprez – the great Franco-Flemish composer who bridged the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance – with music by four Spanish composers of our time. They asked Jesús Torres, José María Sánchez-Verdú, Joan Magrané and Gabriel Erkoreka to write four pieces inspired by Desprez’ motets and chansons: the concept was for such different styles and approaches to reciprocally throw light upon one another across the divide of half a millennium.
Sanja Plohl
Dans Grenade is a series of music for Ibs Classical, which is recorded in emblematic areas of Granada, with a repertoire related to Spanish music or to Spain, and more concretely, to Andalucía and the city of Granada. The recording has taken place in the Manuel de Falla Auditorium, in the setting of the Alhambra and Palace of Charles V, and only metres from the Carmen de la Antequeruela, the meeting place of cultural life in the times of the maestro, which today is still considered a cultural heritage centre of the city. Falla began his Granada phase with guitar composition, and the Homenaje pour le Tombeau de Claude Debussy (1920) is the first work he created in the city, thereupon initiating the best twenty years of his creative life, in a time that was bright with the presence and friendship of Federico García Lorca in el Concurso de Cante Jondo (1922), or in the commemorations of the tercentenary of the death of Góngora (1927). This Auditorium is one of the best medium-sized European acoustic concert halls in every nuance. The recording is done by taking advantage of the clarity and quality of different locations, conferring a lively, immediate sound that we feel as we sit in a chair at the Manuel de Falla Auditorium to enjoy the guitar of Sanja Plohl. This young Slovenian concert performer is characterized by overwhelming technique, precision in execution and variety in sound that make his interpretations of Dans Grenade an intense experience.
Isabel Dombriz
According to some beliefs, during our lives we encounter doors, some leading toward the light and others toward the world of shadows. A question of choice. This disc opens the way toward both Inferno and Paradise. The paths taking us to Hades are represented by three scores, focused from different realities.
Edith Peña
music without trace which conceals the rhythm of life
In this voyage through dance in music for keyboard, Edith Peña draws her traces in the air for us, we recreate the movements in our imagination (we almost see the “dance fairy”) and we attend the dance of life. One dances in the air without traces. It is the wonder of the ephemeral in permanent dialog with life. One dances to live: dances are born and die with the choreographer, the performer, or the spectator. We can not catch the bodies, movements or space but in music remains the rhythm of life. Since the Renaissance the dance master gracefully shapes folk dances and takes the high dances (which are jumped such as the Chaconne or the Gallarda, rhythmic, less connected and relatively spontaneous) toward other lower ones (such as the Pavanne or the Minueto of more glided movements) more melodic, connected and solemn.
Claudio Constantini
Composer born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye on the 22nd of august of 1862 and who died in Paris on the 25th of March of 1918, protagonist of the creative evolution that the 20th century needed to keep ties with history and to search for renewed dialectical reasons for an “organic and animated” speech (Jankelevitch). Debussy modified the inertias without altering the thread of history, he changed the courses without loosing north and avoided the ruptures that lead only to isolation and melancholy. All this is manifested in the works that Peruvian pianist Claudio Constantini reveals to us in this discographic document, second of a series that announces the recording of the complete piano output of the French composer, in which he performs the 24 Preludes, composed by Debussy in two volumes, the first from 1909 to 1910, while he was already ill with the cancer which would cause his death in 1918, and the second from 1911 to 1913. Together with the first book of Preludes, Claudio Constantini performs the Estampes from 1903 and the Ballade Slave from 1890; and next to the second book of Preludes, his Images oubliées from 1894.
Cristo Barrios
Andrew West
We were inspired to gather together this collection of chamber works for reasons beyond the obvious prestige of the individual composers and the importance of their works. We wanted to present the listener with a satisfying musical journey, as much through the formal variety as the expressive content of the pieces, full of contrasts that are to be found among different movements of the same piece, as well as among the five works on the recording. Rather than offering a historical overview of the programme, we would prefer to look briefly at our choice of title, Deep Light, and its various meanings. On the one hand, it aims to evoke the luminosity that lies in the depth of feeling, represented here by two major works of the German Romantic clarinet repertoire, the Grand Duo Concertant by Carl Maria von Weber and Robert Schumann’s Phantasiestücke. Emotionally profound in their darker, slower movements, these works also display an exalted brightness in their exuberant finales.
MdL – Facundo Agudin
Viktor Ullmann arrived in Theresienstadt on 8 September 1942. He was 44 years old, a Jew and a former officer of the Austrian army. Being an accomplished composer, well known for his organizational skills, he was immediately solicited by the Freizeitgestaltung to organize concerts and conferences, to write musical reviews (he authored 26 such texts), and to compose. In fact, during the two years before his transport to Auschwitz, he wrote several instrumental and vocal works, including song cycles for baritone and piano, one sonata for violin and piano, his third string quartet, three piano sonatas (numbers 5, 6 and 7) as well as an opera in one act on a libretto by the young poet Peter Kien Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder die Tod-Verweigerung (The Emperor of Atlantis, or the Disobedience of Death). Ever since his arrival in the ghetto, Ullmann seems aware of the precariousness of his future, as is shown in the quite openly ironic remark on the manuscript of his piano sonata nº 7, dated 22 August 1944: “The performance rights are reserved by the composer until his death”, so, not for long.
In Spain, the term tono humano was used during the Baroque period to refer to secular songs performed at urban spectacles or entertainment events such as theatrical performances, poetry contests, court parties or private concerts. These pieces often provided the musical setting for feasts; travels; promenades; soirées; academies where aristocrats, poets and musicians gathered; and meetings of influential people. Even clerics and nuns enjoyed their free time listening to, playing, singing and composing tonos humanos.
Josu De Solaun
Here is a recording that combines the aesthetic value of music together with the musical works’ historical underpinnings. The pianist Josu De Solaun offers us his interpretation of two of the most significant pieces of the Romantic period: Davidsbündlertänze (1837) by Robert Schumann (1819-1856), the Spring and revolutionary high point of a first Romanticism, and two works by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), heterodox and conflicting protagonists of an autumnal kind of Romanticism: the Intermezzi op. 117 (1892) and the Klavierstücke op. 118 (1893). At the same time, the performer proposes a title that, on the one hand, supports his interpretative ideas and, on the other, aims to be a guide for our understanding and comprehension of how many singularities articulate the content of the recording: DIGRESSIONS, a title suggesting a kind of reflection that sets in during the flow of the musical works themselves.
Marc Paquin & Orfilia Saiz
Regarding the music chosen, it would be impossible not to include, in an album like this one, the two great pillars of the repertoire for these eight strings, Zoltán Kodály’s Duo and Maurice Ravel’s Sonata, an explosion of creativity after the dearth of repertoire for this kind of duo during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both composers manage to dress their music in such an incredible way that this ensemble does not appear bare and the polyphony is complete. In contrast to these two great works, we have chosen three pieces of easier and more emotive listening which, nevertheless, we feel are representative of the different vital issues reflected in their composition; from the spiritual conflict transmitted in P. Vasks’ Castillo Interior to the popular frenzy of I. Xenakis. Closing this album is our own arrangement of Béla Bartók’s Romanian Dances, providing our musical contribution to the repertoire for these two instruments.
Orquesta Barroca Granada
Sebastián Durón is usually recognized as one of the leading Spanish composers of theater music, although this repertoire is barely performed nowadays, even in concert version. As far as we know, ten complete scores of Durón’s stage works have been preserved, four of which are entirely sung, a number that is higher than that found in theater music by other important Spanish musicians of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Juan Hidalgo, Juan de Navas or Antonio Literes. The fact that, in his theater music, Durón uses both the conventions of 17th-century Spanish court theater and some elements of the dramma per musica has placed these pieces in a diffuse and poorly understood territory, unlike what happens with the works of Hidalgo and Literes, repertoire which has been studied better. For some scholars, the theater music of Durón is incoherent due to the introduction of elements that are unfamiliar to the Spanish court theater, in contrast to the great dramaturgy devised by Calderón de la Barca and Hidalgo.
The Dürrenmatt Project is the multifaceted tribute with which Facundo Agudín and Musique des Lumières want to vindicate the figure of a protean and committed artist: from Pflüger’s thrilling tragicomedy Jedes Kunstwerk ist apokalyptisch – oder Bach und Dürrenmatt (Every work of art is apocalyptic – or Bach and Dürrenmatt) to the sardonic and imaginative score of The Minotaure by Genessey-Rappo, passing through the discourse between the atavistic and the experimental of Respiro (Breathe) by Pérez-Ramírez and the mystical and textural sonority of Stoff by Sontòn Caflisch. These four scores highlight Dürrenmatt as a writer and a visual artist; in short, one of the most authentic and respected thinkers of the 20th century.
Dvorak Cello Works
It is the part the cello must interpret by assuming or acquiring a human nature. Dvořák transforms it into a warm lyrical baritone. He repopulates it with harmonics and nuances. And he shows us that the best way to overcome cello “limitations” is none other than to transcend it. Dvořák turns the cello into a meta-cello. Just as in a Mephistophelian pact, he achieves the feat of “animating” it. And the soul is in the score. You have to know how to find it. No one better to do it than Adolfo Gutiérrez Arenas, from his sensitivity, spontaneity and affinity to an instrument he would never have wanted to explore if Bach and Dvořák had not persuaded him otherwise. Rather than Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, Dvořák’s Op. 104 should be called Concerto for Orchestra and Cello. And not because the solo instrument does not shine, but because the bohemian composer subordinates the star onanism to the requirement of concertation. It is not even a concerto for orchestra. It is a concerto with orchestra. Dvořák requires musicians to listen and listen to each other, not only from a chamber music perspective, but also applying reciprocal chromatic and rhythmic attention. It is about exploring textures and dynamics.
Marta Infante
Jorge Robaina
Between 1874 and 1878, the young Antonín Dvo?ák received help from the Austrian government to compose musical works. At that time, he was a promising composer who, having been brought up in Bohemia, not only spoke German but also demonstrated a profound knowledge of the Central European musical tradition. The composer, with all this, very quickly faced reality: in the Vienna of that time what they wanted of a Czech composer was music that sounded Czech, and not German music. Of the works he wrote in those years (among those the Serenade for Strings in E Major, the piano trio in g minor and the Stabat Mater), the one that caught the publisher´s and Brahm´s attention was his song cycle, Moravian Duets. They particularly stood out if we keep in mind, as mentioned by Michael Beckerman, that to the Bohemian composer the Moravian culture was as foreign as any other. This is how history, with its selective forgetfulness, has prolonged for years the European rule has been to label Dvorak a nationalistic Czech composer and author of various worthy symphonies. That he left more than a hundred songs written, that his inspiration went far beyond Bohemian folklore and that he was one of the most prolific Opera composers of his time are irrelevant questions. Only his Rusalka was saved from this collective forgetfulness.
Alberto Rosado
Piano and electronics, a window to the future. Since I played the first work for piano and electronics Lo fijo y lo volátil (1994) by the Spaniard José Manuel López López, I verified that this combination made the piano a more flexible instrument. The electronics would amplify, transform, sustain and would make the sound more flexible whilst surrounding it. The use of electronics was like the nineteenth century orchestra in relation to the piano. In fact even the harmonics could be distorted or the resonance would come to the foreground, something only the pianists could hear given the fact that we were sitting so close to the instrument. From that moment on in 2001, I went in search of a repertoire for this combination.
The selection of works included in this recording provides a small sample of the extraordinary cultural diversity that existed at the Chinese Court over almost two centuries as a result of the stimulus of Diego de Pantoja and his introduction of European music into the Forbidden City. Divided into four large sections that portray and recreate different moments of this unique historical episode, the pieces are linked without interruption, respecting the programmatic form conceived for the concerts: the journey begins with the music of Pantoja’s time, uncovering his musical legacy through the accounts that have come down to us thanks to the missionaries who lived at the Court until the end of the eighteenth century. This program is a tribute to the Spanish Jesuit Diego de Pantoja (1571-1618) on the 450th anniversary of his birth. Pantoja was the first European who, together with the Italian Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), entered the service of the Chinese Court at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This marked the beginning of a unique episode in history in terms of the length and breadth of cultural, scientific and artistic relations between two very different worlds.
Elena Rivera
Jorge Robaina
Emiliana de Zubeldia was born in Salinas de Oro, in Navarra, Spain, to a quite religious middle class family (two of her brothers were priests), who suddenly saw music as her path. After studying in Pamplona and taking examinations at the Madrid Royal Conservatory, she travels to Paris in 1904 to enroll at the Schola Cantorum as a student of Vincent D’Indy, Désiré Pâque and Blanche Selva (the pianist who debuted Albeniz’s Iberia), with the intention of fully dedicating herself to research and composing. In 1920, she earned a post as a piano professor at the Pamplona Municipal Academy of Music. Running away from a soured marriage, she returns to Paris, to develop an intense international career as a piano soloist (Belgium, Switzerland, England, Italy), as she begins to strengthen her work as a composer, performing her own works.
On this CD we present arrangements commissioned by the Moonwinds group (with the obvious exception of Una cosa rara), in continuation of the Harmoniemusik tradition, with the aim of expanding the Spanish, and specifically Valencian, wind ensemble repertoire. We have taken the title, En estil popular (“In the popular style”) from what might be considered the central work of the recording, which we have called Suite en estil popular, based on the string quartet Quartet en estil popular by the great composer Manuel Palau. The version for wind instruments brings a new dimension to the work, which is why we wanted to differentiate it from its original title, labelling it a “Suite” rather than a “Quartet”.
Juan Carlos Garvayo
The Alhambra is precisely a music of changing sequence in which words lose their meaning and are rendered useless. Their melody must be heard, to inhabit the soul with its visible glow. A luxurious book-CD presentation of piano music inspired by La Alhambra: from Debussy to Albéniz, 7 composers, 4.000 words, Alhambra’s pictures… Play Juan Carlos Garvayo, Spanish National Prize of Music 2013.
Camerata Gala
The world of modern musical composition—as opposed to the arguably linear path followed for centuries by Western Music—emerges as a fascinating crossroads where different realities, styles, forms, and sounds meet. This album, besides placing particular attention on the bonds between Spanish and Latin American music, constitutes a breathtaking journey through today’s musical scene, as it ranges from minimalism to abstract, traditional, and folk music, thus becoming a small sample of a big musical world.
Anton & Maite Piano Duo
The art of the piano four hands has gone unnoticed for many years and its historical importance has been minimised in comparison with other chamber music ensembles. Nevertheless, the great composers have dedicated works to this formation, and there is an extensive literature for it. “Essenz” was created with the intention of highlighting the exceptional repertoire written for piano four hands, choosing some of the works we consider to be the fundamental pillars of the genre. Anyone who enters the world of the piano four hands knows that Mozart and Schubert are the names to be reckoned with. These two Austrian geniuses are responsible for the consolidation of this unique musical genre. Mozart was the first to identify the great potential of the format, composing his first four-hand piano sonata when he was nine years old.
Trio Arbós
A group of Spanish composers born at the dawn of the twentieth century who, after suffering the terrible consequences of the civil war as their creative drive flowered, and the reprisals or contempt of a rancorous dictatorship whose cultural fruits were few and shabby, were relegated to an interminable oblivion which continues still. Regrettable historical ruptures, never corrected entirely, which overtook the fascinating musical legacy of an entire generation of Spanish composers of conflicto skills and innovative aesthetic premises, in a void of unpublished scores calling out to be confl, not just because of their intrinsic value but also because of how they explain our recent history and culture.
In a world like today’s, in which everything moves but almost nothing changes, and in which music, in particular -both in its different aesthetic lines and in the programmes in which it is presented- has long seemed to be at a standstill, finding a driving force as intense and genuine as the figure of Fabián Panisello (Buenos Aires, 1963) is a rare occurrence. His miscellaneous profile as a composer, conductor, teacher and prolific entrepreneur of all kinds of musical projects, both in Spain and abroad, reveals such a dynamism characterising him so strongly that, if one had to say something which could encompass him and his work in all these areas, indeed it could be his fundamental trait: being always on the move, pulling forward, favouring movement at all times. PluralEnsemble is an instrumental group specialised in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, founded by Fabián Panisello, its resident director. Always seeking the highest quality of interpretation, it presents every year a stable season of concerts and tours, alternating the most demanding soloist repertoire with works for ensemble. During its trajectory it has performed to great critical and public acclaim in the principal specialised international festivals, such as Biennale di Venezia, New Music Week in Shanghai, Sound Ways International New Music Festival in Saint Petersburg, Musica in Strasbourg…, amongst others.
The album Falla 1915 offers us the opportuni- ty to experience a composer reborn through two of his masterpieces. In Siete canciones populares españolas, the orchestral imagination of composer Francisco Domínguez 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 colour come to- gether to highlight what Falla loved and de- fended most: the preservation of our memory and our cultural heritage.
A unique album in which two of most important Falla’s works come together. The original El Corregidor y la Molinera and its later version El Sombrero de tres picos. No other album contains these two works together. It was Diaghilev who persuaded Falla of the opportunity involved in making a great ballet from the material of El Corregidor y la Molinera, not being satisfied with that farce which, moreover, delighted the public of his time. However, it should be emphasised, that the pantomime involved a formula particularly favoured by Falla as it was based on a silent performance, both in terms of dialogue and incident. Today we can return to “El corregidor y la molinera” not as a mere attempt at “El sombrero de tres picos”, but, from our own perspective, as a more faithful testimony to Falla’s proverbial wish, still outside the spectacular dimension of Massine and Diaghilev.
Paula Coronas
Femmes d’Espagne (Spanish Women) is a tribute to eight composers, most of whom are also pianists, who made Andalusia their musical homeland and spread it all over the world. Just as she usually does in her piano recitals, the versatile Paula Coronas has united in this record acclaimed authors with others not yet much known and in need for a revival of their music, thus emphasizing her unwavering personal commitment to Spanish music of the last two centuries. The interpretations of the malagueña (a traditional flamenco variety from Málaga), forged from the extensive knowledge of the foremost works of piano literature, dignify and update these pages. This recording means a contribution for future generations to gain an understanding and to become aware of the historical relevance of those figures that ennobled the meridional folkloric music styles and turned them into a distinctly Spanish pianism: a genuine and extraordinary music art.
Fin du temps
This album provides the recording of two chamber music works, possibly the most important of the 20th century: The Quartet pour la fin du Temps (Messiaen) and Quatrain II (Takemitsu), both for an unusual instrumental group: clarinet, violin, cello and piano. The Quartet pour la fin du Temps was inspired by the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation and it is dedicated to the Angel of the Apocalypse who lifts his hand toward Heaven and says: « There shall be time no longer, but at the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel the mystery of God shall be consummated ». Toru Takemitsu admired his work and his harmonious language, which influenced his own style. Takemitsu composed Quatrain for clarinet, violin, cello, piano and orchestra, and Quatrain II in 1976-1977 with the same instrumentation of Messiaen’s Quartet, but without an orchestra. An homage to Messiaen, in the same way that Messiaen’s Quartet is based on numeric symbolism, Quatrain is organized around the number four: four in the sense of plenitude, balance, symmetry, four as the lines that make up a stanza in a quatrain, four instruments used, four sections into groups of four bars…
The aim of “Follia nuova” is to further explore and expand the saxophone’s repertoire and to present a transcription of an important violin sonata on the soprano saxophone. The title of the album refers to “follia”, one of Europe’s oldest musical themes that has been used repeatedly by composers throughout history. The theme adopts new variations and characters making it an ever evolving theme in Europe. Further to the main idea of this project the saxophone’s traditional repertoire is renewed through; the presentation of Villa Lobos in its original key, a personal interpretation of Decruck, a version of a piece more and more frequently performed in modern saxophone recordings by Albright and a transcription and reinterpretation of one of the major works in the chamber music repertoire, the Franck sonata.
Xavier Torres
According to Johann Nikolaus Forkel – a student of Bach and his first biographer – the diplomat noble commissioned Bach to write music which would relax him, “during my nights of insomnia, and induce sleep”. Thus Bach came, always in Forkel’s probably fanciful tale, to write his absolutely marvellous Aria with various variations…, which became the Goldberg Variations thanks to the harpsichordist who played them again and again in a lounge adjoining the bedroom during the endless nights of the insomniac Ambassador, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756), another young disciple of Bach whose name would be forever linked to this sublime work which Glenn Gould liked to say had “neither end nor beginning”. There is no other documentary evidence that things were actually like that…
Ardeo Quatuor
The transcription of the Goldberg Variations took place within a context of total respect for the original text. No change of notes or rhythms. The transcription is based on an “orchestration” of the text for four string players. As in an orchestra, all the instruments in the string quartet are not systematically required simultaneously: variations for two, three, or four instruments follow in succession. This redistribution of the material enables new lines to be heard that are often di cult to hear within the uniform sound context of the piano or harpsichord. The Goldberg Variations are a model of polyphonic writing, a synthesis of Bach’s art and contrapunctal mastery: the fugue, the canon, the French overture … Nevertheless, the work cannot be reduced to some mere austere exercise: the dances that permeate the cycle confer a superior dimension of accomplishment to the twilight of the baroque era.
Emilio González
The piano works selected for this recording clearly bring together the three facets of Enrique Granados, composer, pianist and teacher. Granados composed these delightful piano pieces thinking of young pianists, students at his Academy, inviting them to participate in the works he would later share with his intimates, unequivocally awakening a love of music. Apart from encouraging a love of music, Granados points to major details of a great teacher, intelligent fingering, and use of the pedal with a great sense of colour and resonances.
Elena de la Merced, soprano Carol García, mezzo David Menéndez, baritone Rubén Fernández Aguirre, piano
A hundred years following the death of Enrique Granados, the Ibs Classical recording company, based in Granada, presents this double CD with the complete songs for voice and piano. Who does not know Tonadillas en estilo antiguo or the Canciones amatorias, or the delightful Elegia eterna? But is it known that Granados composed forty songs? And six of them for barítone? Or that Las currutacas modestas was originally written for two voices?. The main value of this disc lies in the presentation of eight songs never recorded until now, however improbable that may seem for one of Spain’s most universal composers. Apart from Vita Nuova in Italian, mentioned above, his only French song, Mignon, is heard here for the first time, with five of the eleven Catalan songs: Lo rei i el joglar, Cançó de Gener II, Balada, Escenes de l´exili and No m´enterreu al cementerio, as well as the scintillating Canción del postillón from the set of songs in Spanish.
Alfonso Calderón de Castro
Like Antoni Gaudi, the architect who knew how to insufflate life to modern buildings giving them their most ardent expression, Guinjoan brings vital aesthetic elements to a language that had been lost, taking a legacy that it has its roots in the XX century with names like Robert Gerhard or Jaume Pahissa. Guinjoan’s regulatory ideas do not impose forms beforehand: they sound the necessities of the musical material and from there they set out a new path towards a new classicism. Calderón doesn’t smooth things over these pieces of works, and he does it bestowing them with numerous creative nuances. Guinjoan develops formal procedures, which from an overview like these readings, show themselves as endowed of organic fluidity, however an analytic approach lets us see their great complexity.
Modern performance of the Complete Recorder Sontas of Händel by the especialist David Antich and the famous Spanish ensemble MEDITERRÀNIA CONSORT. This recording of the complete Handel’s recorder sonatas is characterized by a newfangled, Mediterranean and daring reading; an exuberant continuo and improvised ornamentation are common elements in the all sonatas. Mediterrània Consort bases its performance on the constant search for the implicit affetti in this great work by the German composer.
L’Apothtéose
In their last recording project Handel Tribute, L’Apothéose pays homage to the great composer by performing six chamber music top pieces chosen from his op. 2, op. 5 and solo instrument with basso continuo repertoire. Mozart is reputed to have said of G. F. Händel (1685-1759): Handel understands affect better than any of us. When he chooses, he strikes like a thunder bolt. L’Apothéose is considered as one of the reference groups in the historical interpretation in Spain. In recent years the ensemble has won 12 national and international awards including the First Prize at the 2019 York Early Music International Young Artists Competition (United Kingdom), First Prize at the Göttingen Händel Competition 2017(Germany), Second Prize at the prestigious Internationaal Van Wassenaer Competition 2018 within the Oude Muziek Festival in Utrecht (Netherlands) and the Second Prize at the Concours International de Musique Ancienne de Val de Loire 2017 (France) chaired by William Christie.
Harpsichord Concertos
In addition to including three harpsichord concertos composed in the 20th century, this CD offers suggestive interweavings: The concertos by Falla and Poulenc were both composed for Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), the great Polish harpsichordist who decisively contributed to the rediscovery of much 17th- and 18th-century music and to the renaissance of the harpsichord, not only as an ancient instrument, but also as a source of inspiration for 20th-century musicians. Poulenc’s Concert champêtre is the immediate heir of Falla’s Concerto. Accordingly, in the orchestral score of Poulenc’s Concert belonging to Falla, we can read the following autograph dedication by the French composer: “For you, my dear Falla, the little brother of your so magnificent Concerto. Fr. Poulenc”. The three concertos share a neoclassical aesthetic, albeit from different approaches: in his Concerto Falla explores and uses the ancient sources of Hispanic music; Poulenc evokes the French Baroque; and Bacarisse adopts stylistic elements typical of the neoclassicism of the 1920s.
Hauspoz
Few instruments are as close to the present as the accordion does. Its own history has defined it: the chromatic accordion, in its present form, dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, but its great evolution in repertoire has not begun until the middle of the twentieth century. Therefore, it is a young instrument compared to others such as the violin or the flute, but it has been precisely the path it had not traversed what has marked the spectacular growth of the accordion in the last decades. Basque performer Iñaki Alberdi does not hesitate to say that the accordion “is the most relevant instrument of the second half of the 20th century and what has passed of the 21st. It is evolving at a great speed and all composers write for it.” Alberdi warns, however, that “in this process, it is important for the accordionists to get involved and support them.»
In the player’s own words, this is not a dialectical CD. That is, it is not conceived against someone. Instead, it is devotional, votive, a hymn of sorts, or better, a sonorous love letter to the great Haydn, to what he represents for me in music and in life, and to what it means to intertwine myself with him, to blend with him and with his scores. This album does not pretend to be the “last word” in Haydn scholarship or performance, or something that breaks “new interpretative ground”, or something pretending to discover the musical Mediterranean, or to present a “Haydn” purified of ideological “crusts”,“accretions”, “stylistic prejudices”, or of the much-feared “ghost” of “subjectivity”. The controversy is served…
Silvia Márquez
Yes, there is 20th-Century Spanish music written for such an old instrument as the harpsichord! Composers do not impose limits: they love its rythm, timbre, they love dreaming the past. Following the traces of her exciting last CD Chaconnerie –including Latin Grammy nominated Montuno by Roberto Sierra–, harpsichordist Silvia Márquez Chulilla presents here a stunning bouquet of pieces composed between 1952 (on a Pleyel harpsichord!) and 1996. Apparently a feminine world, it was the charismatic Wanda Landowska who inspired Manuel de Falla, the first leading composer of the 20th century to turn his gaze to the harpsichord. Then many composers from the 20th century enthusiastically wrote for Antoinette Vischer, Annelie de Man, Elisabeth Chojnacka, and Goska Isphording. And in Spain, in the sixties, it was to be Genoveva Gálvez –the first professor of harpsichord in her country– who would manage to make that initially solitary voyage attractive to contemporary composers with its surprising sonorities –it is for good reason that three of the pieces amassed here are dedicated to her–.
Jesús Rodolfo
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) is without a doubt, one of the most revolutionary composers of the 20th Century. Among his achievements, completing a sonata for each of the orchestral instruments shows how versatile this composer was. As an acclaimed violist himself, he dedicated to the viola an extended part of his complex and unique composing literature. These four monumental sonatas for viola solo represent the backbone of the viola repertoire, which also demonstrates a synergy of compositional language rooted in the Baroque, representing the technical, structural and philosophical evolution of this German composer.
Vandalia & Ars Atalantica
They are sung pieces, in verse and vernacular language, known in that period as human tones (or just tones) when they were profane, and divine tones when they were religious. Those composed in the first half of the 17th century were mostly polyphonic, which reveals that, in this period, polyphony was still thought to be the highest and most prestigious. The Book of Human Tones, preserved at present at the National Library of Spain under the signature M 1262, constitutes, with its 222 works, a privileged sample of all the aspects. Who might be interested in these works has now the possibility to listen to them in a retrained performance on four voices with harp accompaniment, one of the instruments used in this repertoire. If, on the one hand, the vocal quartet shows that the “grace notes” (“quiebros”) and voice effects do not constitute an impediment for the care of tuning, on the other hand the harp adds to the score beautiful introductory and transition passages based on the features of passacaglias and 17th century dances.
Mariano García
Aniana Jaime
This album emerged from the idea of focusing attention on a new saxophone and piano repertoire, which, although fully contemporary and modern, has an inspiration and aesthetic side based on chamber music tradition. Aspects such as the pure sonority, the liking for colour and details, the interaction of these instruments and communication through a linear language sustained by melody and rhythm, make of these works “new classics” of the repertoire. This project includes mostly first world recordings, and therefore leads to the opening of a performing path that will surely be long and varied, and may offer many and diverse approaches in the future. After all, a recording is just a photograph of an instant. The attempt to capture the volatile essence of a physically ephemeral but spiritually everlasting art. Music, like the one included in this album, like life, diverse and variable. Thus this work which is flexible, eclectic… alive
It should come as no surprise that an instrument with the horn’s peculiar sound potential and its attractive combination with two such devices as the violin and the piano has seduced classical composers such as Brahms or Ligeti. In this context, it is necessary and tremendously opportune that Escauriaza, Colom and Pascal have asked Sierra for a new work that updates the genre and enhances the virtuosity and expressiveness of the trio from today’s perspective. Thus, this disc proposes a journey from the past to the present through the last three centuries and by means of three works linked by history. Ligeti refers to Brahms, and Sierra to both: three essential and inseparable links. Miguel Colom is concertmaster violinist in the National Orchestra of Spain. Manuel Escauriaza is hornist in the National Opera Orchestra of Paris. Denis Pascal is a famous international pianist, professor in Conservatory Superior of Paris.
La Tempestad – Silvia Márquez
In February 2015, La Tempestad presented in the “Universo Barroco” cicle of the Auditorio Nacional de Madrid a revival, in modern times and with historically informed performance, of M. Narro’s Concerto for harpsichord and G. B. Pergolesi’s Concerto for two harpsichords. Completing the programme were some sonatas for the examinations for the Royal Chapel in Madrid, edited by Judith Ortega, who at the time reminded us about the existence of another Hispanic concerto for harpsichord: the one by José Palomino. While Narro’s concerto received warm praise, Pergolesi’s piece turned out to be the surprise of the night, as said by both audience and critics. Knowing the quality of the music, we also felt the need to show and defend a language which was very different from that of the harpsichord concerts by Bach, Haendel or their peers.
The piano pieces, all of them, show the lushness of aromas, colors, and reflections of prodigal lands in the production of artistic sensations. One could speak of landscapes in which the human element is present; the voice of a folk tradition which longs to express its most intimate essence, not in an illustrative but in an evocative sense. They embody a perfect communion between the performer, the music, and the context, governed by its aesthetic values that connect with the principles of reason, logos, and intelligence. The first cultural theme of nationhood is the idea of community reflected through shared memory and values, and, in this project by pianist Juan Carlos Fernández-Nieto they find their musical testimony.
This recording project is a journey through the piano literature from its beginnings. Unceasingly searching for timbres and colours, as part of a profound conception of music, Ambrosio Valero transports the listener from the grandeur of Bach’s organ to the recreation of the sounds of nature by Mompou and Granados.
Javier Raméix
Sonorous festival full of colors, smells and rhythms that describe that intense America, which is full of paradoxes, that one day awoke to its own magic and that of the twentieth century. Heitor Villa-Lobos, responsible for Brazil’s national awakening, was a music humanist. Ginastera always sought reconciliation between the melodic and rhythmic elements of Argentine folklore and the most advanced techniques that came from Europe. Ginastera left us a beautiful legacy for piano that covered all his artistic life, from the three Danzas argentinas Op. 2, from 1937 to the Sonata No. 3 Op. 55, written a year before his death. The burrowing Joropo (M.Moleiro) with festive air is the national dance of Venezuela and is often heard at its popular and religious festivals. Mañanita caraqueña (E.Castellanos) is evocative and perfect music: the nostalgia of Caracas when waking up and the bells of the cathedral. Javier Rameix debut in the prestigious “Muziekgebouw” in Amsterdam received critical acclaim. He played as a soloist in Europe and South America with different orchestras and performed solo recitals in the most important venues in Holland, Spain, France, Belgium and Germany.
Del Valle Piano Duo
Impulse is a project born with a clear communicative intention. This is our first recording project, and thus must become our “carte de visite”, our identity, a record with which we can get through to the audiences and which clearly expresses who we are as artists. But Impulse is much more than a debut album: it states our intentions being the first in a series of albums that will claim our instrumental formation as a piano duo. This formation has been neglected for many years and is still associated by many with certain amateurism, as was the case with the string quartet until recently. However, the piano duo is a group that demands perfection in their performers. Possibly, along with the quartet, it is the only group in the field of chamber music that requires such a high specialization. The piano, whose sound response is immediate, increases the difficulty of achieving a uniform performance simultaneously from the two musicians: playing 4 hands or 2 pianos, any mismatch is perceived, there is no room for inaccuracy. Both pianists must use the same attack, controlling their weight, mass, speed…
Tomás Marco – Luciano González
The preparation of this cantata has its origin in the poetic text written by Luciano González Sarmiento in 2015, which served the libretto for the music composed by Tomás Marco the next year (2016). Organized in five episodes, The devastated island is a description of mankind in her decline, compelled to live in the loneliness of a devastated island, where she faces the agonizing dilemma between life and death, a dilemma solved by the loving experience reconstructed in the warm sea of the Nereids. It is a work of evocative poetics that tries to fuse together music and word, and to flow by all its timbre, prosodic and phonetic parameters, broken-down in each of the characters according to their experiential features. The narrator acts as a “corypheus” transmitting his woes; the shadow (mezzosoprano) as an oracle of predictions; the choir as the collective expression and the discourse nexus between the main characters of a complex plot and the twilight (tenor) that personifies mankind, castaway in the crossroad of her decline, lost in the stagnation of her own nature.
Juan Antonio Higuero
Con esta grabación se presenta en primicia la integral para piano de Juan Alfonso García, reconocido fundamentalmente como compositor coral. Con una abundante producción de música religiosa y profana, se puede afirmar que es uno de los autores más influyentes de la música coral española del cambio de siglo. A ello se une su faceta como intérprete de órgano y compositor de un buen número de obras para este instrumento durante los cincuenta años en que ha ejercido como organista en la catedral de Granada. La obra para piano de Juan-Alfonso García consta de ocho piezas. Si bien ocupa un lugar menor dentro de su extensa producción, no está exenta de interés, pues es una muestra de toda su evolución estilística. Aunque el propio autor confiesa, con su habitual sencillez, estar despreocupado por seguir una determinada trayectoria evolutiva. (Alprazolam) A través de ella observamos cómo sus inicios están ligados a la tradición pianística española, desde su primera obra Tres movimientos de danza (1962, revisada en 1976), donde rinde homenaje al recuerdo de Falla, Granados y Albéniz. Posteriormente se adentra en el neoclasicismo con sus Variaciones, compuestas catorce años más tarde, en 1976. Al año siguiente se produce una ruptura radical en su estilo pianístico y compone su obra cumbre para piano, Toccata (1977); es la más extensa, virtuosística y vanguardista dentro de su propio lenguaje. A partir de entonces el maestro no seguirá este camino compositivo, sino que volverá al lenguaje tonal tradicional.
Joan Enric Lluna
Leonard Bernstein has always loomed large among the musicians who have most fascinated me. Not only did he demonstrate huge vitality and charisma as a conductor, and compose the wonderful music that is his legacy, but he worked tirelessly as a communicator and “pedagogue”. His explanations of wide-ranging aspects of music to the viewers of his television programme for children, his lectures at Harvard University and his books have all been an enormous source of information. In recognition of the centenary of his birth, we dedicate to him this recording of his works for clarinet. At the same time, we pay homage to another musician whom I greatly admire – Benny Goodman – and include two other works directly linked to the theme of this CD – the impact of jazz on Bernstein’s output. For this recording I have worked with some excellent musicians and friends to whom I would like to give my thanks for their contribution and huge talent: Juan Carlos Garvayo on piano, Voro Bolón on cello, Toni García on double bass and Ignasi Doménech on drums.
This CD presents itself before us like a photograph, still in development, of a part of the vital outline of Jesús Torres (1965). It shows us his essential characteristics, his concerns, and the solutions he has adopted throughout the more than twenty years covered by this volume (1997-2018). The main body of the work was written between 1997 and 2004, the time of the composition of the Variations for cello and piano, but his resources already outline and anticipate a future whose culmination -at least for the moment- we can see in his vocal music and his opera, Tránsito 2020. And not only that, he also takes us into his personal relationships with musicians with whom he shares trajectory and who have been patrons of his music. Torres composes with specific musicians in mind, amplifying their technical and expressive qualities.
Joaquín Clerch
Exotic Hispanic sounds with savour of rum, wood and nostalgia.
Allá donde se habla el castellano is a tour of those musics, intermixed from Cuba to Spain, Paraguay or Argentina, through the strings of the guitar, an instrument resting between America and Spain, born of the fusion of Christian and Moslem cultures in the Spanish Middle Ages and Renaissance. Even in the eighteenth century, Santiago de Murcia’s volumes, found in Mexico, point to a great variety of musical cultures, with works in Spanish, French and Italian style, and other intrinsically American genres. Dating from the end of that century, a Libro de Zifra found in Lima with minuets and sonatas in the style of Domenico Scarlatti, points to the transition to classicism and provides a sample of the music heard in the salons of Lima between 1790 and 1810. America has enriched the guitar repertoire of the romantic and contemporary centuries, breathing new life into it and igniting passion for the instrument in composers and performers. The Cuban guitarist Joaquín Clerch (Havana, 1965), a musician with a broad training and the inspiration for this project, has carefully selected a repertoire that he interprets with an innovative artistic vision, a body of shared objects, a treasury of past musics, cementing the foundations of this profoundly Hispanic artist.
This musical production is a long tour of Spanish music, from the complete works of spanish composer José Faus. Since most popular spanish music (marches celebrations, Easter music, Hymns, bullfights music…) to symphonic music inspired by andalussian symbols such as the Alhambra, Sierra Nevada, the Mediterranean Sea, … The best proposal for Spanish music from the popular view of andalussian culture, to the highest level symphonics pieces.
José Menor
Few great piano works have fascinated me quite as much as the Goyescas Suite, the masterpiece by Enrique Granados (1867-1916). This extraordinary work immerses us in a rich, complex world, full of contrasting emotions and characters, with an expressive intensity that has always captivated me. Under the title Los majos enamorados (‘The Gallants in Love’), the six pieces that form the Suite transport us, as if in a romantic dream, to the idealised Spain of Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), with its lights and shadows. A few years ago, I had the good fortune to meet members of the Granados family – wonderful people – who encouraged me to enter Granados’ creative world as a musical researcher. I started investigating his manuscripts, including Goyescas. The more I examined the Goyescas manuscripts, facsimile and Granados’ piano rolls, the more thrilling it was to rediscover this work of genius, one as important as Iberia by Albéniz. I saw those sources differed on occasion from the published editions and recordings. That sparked my curiosity, and I started exploring this unique Suite from a compositional point of view. Rather than being just a major piano work in my repertoire, Goyescas became a great personal adventure for me.
This CD is not only a confession and result of my great admiration for the music of Sergei Prokofiev, it also reflects an intense examination of one of the most multifaceted and versatile artists of the 20th century. My chosen program spans around three decades of his compositional works, in which hope and fate, innocence and abyss, directly intertwine and contrast each other. At the heart of this recording is the ballet Romeo and Juliet, based on the play by William Shakespeare. In addition to a total of three orchestral suites, the composer also created a suite for piano containing ten selected transcriptions from the orchestral version. This version, for the first time, includes six other pieces from Romeo and Juliet, which I arranged for the piano in 2020.They add other famous themes to the original piano suite as well as about half of it’s original duration.
Carmelo Bernaola is one of the Generation of 51’s most representative spanish composers. After training as a clarinettist, he studied at the Madrid Royal Conservatory with Francisco Calés Otero and Julio Gómez, between 1951 and 1958. He won the Roma Prize, leading him to live in Italy for two years (1960-1962). During this era, he made contact with the European avant-garde in classes by Goffredo Petrassi and Bruno Maderna and discovered Sergiu Celibidache’s phenomenology of music. Returning to Madrid in 1962, he received the National Music Award. He premiered his orchestral work Espacios variados, the first attempt to combine intervallic serialism with the mobile or aleatoric form. In the 60s, he also began to work as an audiovisual composer, creating more than a hundred soundtracks. He became director of the Jesús Guridi Music Conservatory in Vitoria-Gasteiz, where he would teach students such as Zuriñe F. Gerenabarrena (include in this CD with “Jaso”). This era produced notable works using quotations from and allusions to other music, and completed two large projects in the 90s: the cantata Euskadi and the ballet La Celestina, which was premiered in 1998 in the re-opened Teatro Real of Madrid. Conductor Nacho de Paz is specially renowned for his commitment to the music of XXth and XXIst centuries. His work with experimental, multimedia and new creation repertoire is a reference in Spain. He has been awarded the international composition prizes Joan Guinjoan (2002), Luigi Russolo (2003) and SGAE of electroacoustics (2004). He got specialized in Orchestral Conducting with Arturo Tamayo and Pierre Boulez. Hi is conductor by Ensemble Modern.
In the late 1820s, European music was at a fascinating crossroads: the musical style that had dominated the old continent since 1780 (commonly known as “Viennese Classicism”) was in crisis and entering its final phase. At a time when tradition and innovation coexisted, emerging expressive needs pushed composers to seek alternatives to classical canons. La contemplazione offers a glimpse into this period through two authors who, while almost antagonistic, were also complementary and contemporary: Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) and Franz Schubert (1797-1828).
Pianist Antonio Oyarzabal continues to show us in this album that a multitude of female composers who deserve to be known and recognised still remain forgotten. On this occasion, he offers us a selection of pieces by 18 unique authors, most of them pianists, from different periods and geographical origins. In all cases, their professional development was hindered by their status as women and by the social pressure of the historical period in which they lived. Oyarzabal finds intense and authentic artistic stimulation in the process of researching their career paths and in the enthusiastic interpretation of their music.
BOOKLET:
Carmen Solís
Rubén Fernández Aguirre
In these Verdi songs we can experience the essences of his style: the breadth of the arc of the phrase, the characteristic weight of the word in his music, the sense of drama and especially the charisma of the theatrical character in flesh and blood. There are no objective narrators, there are no mythical beings, it does not hide in evanescent metaphors. There is a character in each song, an emotional motivation, a dramatic scene that invites us to imagine the before and after, the opening and closing of the curtain. Singers forge their first connections with the score through the piano, creating a unique and unavoidable intimacy in the adventorous process of exploring new paths just with their voice. The piano is a kind companion when a sudden stop is needed to go back and repeat, again and again, looking for a new color in the voice, a different way to render a given phrase, to ask for an unexpected or improvised change of tempo and dynamics. With the piano, the voice feels completely naked and is willing to take new risks, choosing the most becoming patterns, welcoming new groundbreaking rules beyond tradition and caution.
Xianji Liu
Latin sonatas is a journey through the popular music of Brazil, Cuba and Puerto Rico, its rhythms, harmonies and colours, in a contemporary language breathing new life into the old form.
From the first movement of Sergio Assad Sonata, Xianji Liu’s precision and sonorous clarity in every note stands out, rekindling the rhythms hidden in the figuration. The Andante bursts with lyricism, sonorous wealth and variety, with crystalline clarity in the tied sounds. Liu demonstrates maturity in the work’s conception, drawing each motif, reminding us of it and allowing the central movement to reveal its coherence. The Presto is by no means a wild race, Liu astonishing with the evenness of his touch, the sonorous clarity and the diction of the melodies, while taking care with each note in the accompaniment, each harmonic, each chord, constructing a great sonorous building. Xianji Liu’s interpretation of Sonata del Decamerón Negro (Brouwer 2012) reveals the rhythms, repetitions, echoes and harmonics of the first movement. His lyricism is seen in the central section and he becomes a Renaissance minstrel, to give Milán’s tientos their gravity. Xianji Liu masters the complexity of Sierra’s music. The first movement clearly sets out the motifs and rhythms, tracing an arch structure perfectly fitting sonata form. The second movement themes are not lost, nor the intensity of the chords, nor the transparent sounds of the close. The confrontation between the two musics Sierra writes in the Scherzando is also perfectly interpreted»
Moonwinds – Joan Enric Lluna
Cristina Montes, harp
Jesús Bal y Gay (Lugo 1905 – Madrid 1993) and Salvador Bacarisse (Madrid 1898 – Paris 1963) were two musicians and intellectuals who belonged to the group known as the Generation of ‘27. Having received their education in Spain, they went into exile as a consequence of the atrocities of the Civil War that Spain suffered between 1936 and 1939.
Joven Orquesta Nacional de España
“While composing this symphony I thought about our people’s nobility, his heroism, about marvellous humanist ideas, human values, our splendid Nature, mankind, beauty…” With this statement Shostakovich specifies the humanism that supports the philosophical discourse of this symphony, establishing at the same time the methodological basis on which he builds the musical dramaturgy of the work. The programme initially proposed by Shostakovich as narrative outline of his symphony, divided in four episodes – War, Memories, The intensity of patriotic space, Victory – does not involve more significance than a statement of intent and, in any case, a description of the dramatic spaces where the discourse will move.
The conception of Lide ta Ixidor did not follow the usual characteristics of lyrical theatre close to the nationalist ideology: the allusion to lost freedoms, love of the Basque language, a legendary common past, an idyllic rural setting and the value of religion, which were relegated to the present work; although as an exception, it is set in a farmhouse near the Biscayan palace of Zubialdea and includes the birth of Jesus and the arrival of the Three Wise Men. At the premiere on 24 May 1910, the press, chroniclers and music critics included all kinds of laudatory adjectives.
In New York it is impossible, almost forced, not to end up trapped by the music of Philip Glass. His operas sound at the Metropolitan Opera, his portrait by Chuck Close on the 86th Street subway and that “Mad Rush” of the city that never sleeps. This project was born influenced by the performer’s musical moment and circumstances after having lived in the Big Apple for 7 years. This “Mad Rush – Philip Glass” project has brought together some of the most representative pieces by one of the most influential composers on the current music scene, recently awarded the XIV BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Music and Opera “for his extraordinary contribution to musical creation and opera, with a great impact on the history of music in the 20th and 21st centuries”, according to the jury.
Gustav Mahler’s music is that music which we all make a little bit our own when we listen to it. The Austro-Bohemian composer knew how to express his inner world by means of his harmonies. And he did so by speaking of the universal themes that occupy ordinary people: life, childhood, love, nature or death. Gustav Mahler’s 4th Symphony, as well as the song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), is based on Arnim and Brentano’s collection of children’s stories of the same name. The fantasy that emanates from this piece of literature finds in Mahler a natural catalyst, who manages, with each musical impulse, articulation, nuance, glissando, harmonic or any other of the myriad of details that inhabit his scores, to transport us to the dreamy and magical world of children’s stories, thus developing a fragile balance between utter fiction and overwhelming reality. With his 4th Symphony, Mahler brings to an end his so-called Wunderhorn period, marked by the reverie and imagination which can be found in such tales.
Orquesta Filarmónica de Málaga
The recording of such a complex and ambitious work as Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony by the Malaga Philharmonic Orchestra (OFM in Spanish) is a demonstration of the determination and enthusiasm with which the group is facing his 30th anniversary. Highly artistic work, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is of great extension and expressive intensity; it is full of deep symbolism and evident spirituality. It is a musical and intellectual monument testing the quality of an orchestra and its conductor. It is a challenge that, in a market full of references to the Austrian composer’s masterpiece, the OFM faces with all the potential the work demands. In his first four symphonies, Gustav Mahler tried to identify with four ideas: the first, the power of will against destiny; the second, hope in the resurrection; in the third a certain “Nietzschean” pantheism, and the fourth is a musical manifesto about innocence.
Maitena (1909) was a further step towards achieving the ideal of Basque opera linked to that of its own lyric theatre. For the critic and musicographer Francisco Gascue: “Colin has written a score that is as far from Wagnerian complications as it is from orchestral poverty; it is accessible without being poor or rudimentary. Colin has shown the same exquisite taste in the handling of the orchestra as in the choice of melodies”. He also singles out the duet between Domingo and Maitena at the beginning of Act I, the tenor and baritone duet that follows, the quartet in Scene VI, the melody sung by Chaadiñ at the beginning of Act II, Batista’s couplets and for its effect and simplicity the Angelus scene. He ends by noting the appropriate treatment of the chorus. The action tells the story of the rich farmer Piarres Landaburu, Maitena’s father, and his intention to marry her off to Ganich, a young man from a good family, rather than to an unfortunate pelotari named Domingo. Maitena, contrary to her father, marries Domingo and goes to America in search of a new life. After being widowed in Buenos Aires, she returns to her father’s home where she finds only repudiation. Maitena moves away, but her father welcomes her back into his home, favouring her marriage to Ganich and thus returning the family to live together again.
Charles Koechlin had a very personal style and was inspired by a wide variety of motifs, as nature, the mysterious Orient, French folk songs… Sometimes, he came close to musical Impressionism, as in Au Loin. Hindemith’s composed the Sonata for the english horn in 1941, by which time he had moved to the United States, where he was teaching at Yale University. The Sonata for cor anglais and piano of Dirk Michael Kirsch is a very intimate homage to the composer’s homeland (Westerland/Sylt, Germany), in which he musically evokes colourful images of landscapes and souls. The work of Ander Perrino combines several ideas that I wanted to try out and that has a very strong connection to popular music. Following the initial idea, each movement is independent as if it were a story, hence the name of Five short stories.
Patricia Arauzo
Karol Szymanowski was a central figure in the renewal of Polish music, since, although his catalogue is not extensive, he managed to open the doors to the contemporary school of his nation in the piano, orchestral, chamber and vocal fields. It is to be thanked that the emerging pianist Patricia Arauzo has chosen this composer as the protagonist of her first solo album. The rigour and transparency, as well as the impetus and expressive force, characterise the approach to his work. Furthermore, the clarity with which Arauzo manages to make the simultaneous sound levels independent and to highlight the hidden themes interweaving the dense texture gives his versions an extraordinary communicative capacity, not easy to achieve in the Polish composer’s art. The five works he has recorded in Masques allow us to go through the three creative stages of Szymanowski’s career through the piano. They are three periods in which he cultivated eclectic languages that made up a polyhedral personality dotted with recurrent elements such as dance rhythms, with their vibrant internal energy. Above all, they shaped the concept of the masque as an element of concealment or a defensive shield against a vital and artistic reality that was not understood in his time.
The three works in this CD are different in character and purpose, but they are related by the idea of bringing smaller pieces together into a larger collection. They belong to a long tradition of keyboard music dating back to the baroque period. The Estudios rítmicos y sonoros (Studies in Rhythms and Sonorities) harken back to the grand virtuoso tradition of piano pieces by Chopin and Liszt, while the Piezas líricas(Lyric Pieces) and the Album for the Young contemplate a more intimate world that passes from the Book for Anna Magdalena Bach to Schumann, and also to Grieg’s Lyric Pieces. (Roberto Sierra, composer)
¡Oferta!
Manuel Galiana – Marisa Blanes
A contemporary musical interpretation of Christian mysticism in the Golden Age
On the occasion of Saint Teresa’s Fifth Centenary, six major present-day composers, on both sides of the Atlantic, undertake to explain the depth of texts which transcend the centuries, from the standpoint of today’s aesthetic. A union of music and the spoken word, reviving the classic genre of the melologue, escorting us through the intense literary work of the Doctor of the Church to carry the thought of spoken language to sonorous circles beyond the word but which reinforce its contents. Four Spanish composers, from different generations, have come together in this enthralling adventure. From the generation on the edge of being senior, two from Madrid, one with Canary Islands roots and the other Navarre-Andalusian, Carlos Cruz de Castro (1941) and Tomás Marco (1942), have tackled two works based on the profound prose of the mystic writer.»
Masterpiece that shows the immense talent of a musician who is fundamental to understanding the evolution of German music throughout the 17th century and, very particularly, that of religious music. Music of spiritual edification, music of mystical inspiration -almost an exercise in contemplation or adoration- that, following the words that the composer himself writes on the cover of the manuscript of the score, must be sung with the humblest devotion, wholeheartedly. (“humble Totius Cordis Devotione decantata”). In 1680 Buxtehude composes the cycle entitled Membra Jesu nostri, when Bach was not yet born. It was still almost 45 years before he wrote the first of two of his known passions, the St. John Passion. But with the composition of that music sheet, Buxtehude marks a before and after in the repertoire of music related to the Passion of Christ.
Gustavo Díaz Jerez
The Metaludios are relatively short works grouped in books of six pieces. In this CD I present the first three, totaling eighteen pieces. This project started in 2013 but does not end here; the fourth book is almost finished and a fifth is on its way. The word Metaludio is derived from the prefix meta-, “beyond” and the suffix -ludio, from the Latin ludēre, “to play”, “to exercise”. When coining this word, I tried to encompass these pieces beyond the usual preludes, interludes, etc. I have tried to give each Metaludio its own character, with distinguishing features that define its identity and differentiate it from the next. The titles give them away, sometimes because of the underlying scientific process, sometimes because of a mythological story behind, a tribute to a specific artist, or simply because of a sound resource that develops and grows in complexity.
These two new books of metaludios, which continue the three already recorded on a CD released in 2018, explore new sound territories through the piano. Science is once again the main pillar underlying the compositional process of these twelve new pieces. Multiple scientific disciplines serve as generators of musical raw material: biology (L-system, Mice music), psychoacoustics (Eigengrau), astronomy (Boötes void, Cassini’s dream), artificial intelligence and machine learning (Hidden states), as well as pure mathematics (Belphegor’s prime). As in the previous three books, Gustavo Díaz-Jerez have also found inspiration in mythological figures (Melussyne, Stribog), and have paid tribute to artists I admire (Omaggio a Carlo Gesualdo, La spiral del viento, Pavana triste).Many of the metaludios use electronics and inside-the-piano extended techniques, not as mere effects but as a necessary and integrating part of the musical discourse. It is important to Gustavo, as performer as well as composer, that the pianistic writing is as comfortable and ergonomic as possible, but without distorting the original idea or sacrificing brilliant and virtuosic writing.Since the composition of the first metaludios, back in 2013, Díaz-Jerez demonstrates that the sound possibilities of the piano have only one limit: our own imagination.
Mosaicos is a cross-section of today’s musical creation in our country. The Musicalis Trio is contributing to the ongoing configuration of our artistic history, helping generate a new and valuable repertoire for the instrumental combination of clarinet (especially the bass clarinet), violin and piano. On this map of Spanish stylistic diversity at the commencement of the 21st century we travel from the sonic exaltation of Parra to the timbral speculation of Sánchez-Verdú, passing on the way the luminosity of Torres, the eclecticism of Greco and the lyricism of Paús. The added value of the members of the Musicalis Trio starts with their rigorous and enthusiastic interpretation of this music, demonstrating their exceptional capacity of adaptation to each language.
José Luis Morillas
Any physical or external journey implies taking an interior one, one that reaches sensations and impressions and catches the general atmosphere and feelings. I visited Granada and the Alhambra Palace for the first time in September 1976. Many adjectives come to my mind to describe that personal experience but if I was to sum it up I would say it was love at first sight. Shortly afterwards, I felt compelled to discover the rest of this magnificent region of Southern Spain, Andalucia, one that has inspired me the most and for which I wrote a great deal of music pieces. Thoughout this musical journey, one may find elements of the Spanish and local folk songs in the various scales, melodies and motifs, including in the compositions themselves. The ongoing dialogue between the instruments, the harmony between the various ensembles, the brilliant interpretation and rich colour effects assert the high professional and artistic quality of the musicians. They merge the listener into a quite harmonious atmosphere. (Jean Maurice Mourat)
The complete 6 Piano Trios by Mozart, as interpreted here by the Vega Trio, are works of high aesthetic value that will not only be a pleasure for the listener but also an enriching source of knowledge and reflection for the scholar. His aesthetic and formal relationship with Haydn’s 43 trios and the 6 attributed to Beethoven mark out an ideal path for discovery in this sense. Haydn will become a formal discourse, according to the new parameters of the sonata form, that he inherited from the Baroque: the Sonata Trio (Trio-sonata), based on the structural patterns of Sonatas da Chiesa or da Camera, in which one or more leading instruments are accompanied harmonically by a basso continuo. Mozart, in addition to stamping an expressive seal of narrative character onto the “sonata” form in each of his 6 Trios, progressively disconnects the “accompanying” instruments from their merely harmonic function in order to enable them to play a leading role, incorporating the piano´s concertante character into the formal structure with respect to string instruments.
Stephan Rougier & Sophie Teboul
The Sonatas for piano & violin, K. 378, 454 and 526 represent the pinnacle of Mozart’s creativity for keyboard and string ensemble. Their composition is inscribed in the artistic and personal life of Mozart and mark a stage in his development at decisive moments of his life: remarkably, they were not specially commissioned. They were composed in a free style yet the music speaks of the musician’s internal tension at the time when he decided to break free from his links to Salzburg and from the burdensome tutorship of his father to take control of his own creativity.
Antonio Oyarzabal
Pianist Antonio Oyarzabal takes us on a journey through the work of thirteen different female composers, most of them pianists. Their pieces have been a real source of motivation and inspiration for him. Here he pays tribute to the names and work of these women, unfairly and sadly neglected, in the shadow of compositions written by men. It is a musical journey that takes us on different paths: from Jacquet de la Guerre’s French Baroque style to the avant garde proposals of Ruth Crawford Seeger in the beginning of the XXth century; from Lili Boulanger’s languor to Germaine Tailleferre’s constant joviality; or from the more popular Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn to the almost completely unknown Mana Zucca or Lūcija Garūta. All of this is expressed by the extraordinary sensitivity of a performer who, through long and intense research, has dived deep into the life and historical context of these thirteen unique artistic voices, in order to provide them with the relevance they deserve.
Luis Aracama
This music is silent because its audition is internal… Its emotion is secret and does only take a sound shape in its resonances under the huge cold dome of our solitude. Federico Mompou described this way in his admission speech to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint George not only the profound significance of his work titled Silent Music, but also his essential values and the sensitive attitude of both interpreter and listener to submerge in the asceticism that its course proposes. A description which is in line with the author of the verses that stimulated so much sound beauty, the most illustrious of our mystics, Saint John of the Cross, who, in the Prologue to his The Spiritual Canticle, names the explicit music in his verses: silent, because it is calm and peaceful intelligence. Although each book of Mompou’s Silent Music is composed on different tempi, the work possess a united structure; the configuration in four books only responds to its chronological order of composition and not to a formal organization previously designed.
In 2022, we celebrated Heinrich Schütz, a central figure of the album, on the 350th anniversary of his death. As a culmination of a series of projects around his person and work, this recording wants to serve as a tribute to an extraordinary musical legacy that found in Johann Sebastian Bach, its greatest supporter. The manifest bond between both composers here is seen in the way in which death is shaken and beaten for later, collected from within our soul, be restored and sublimated by two artistic personalities capable of transcending a rich amalgamation of religious, cultural, and musical aspects around the ars moriendi of his time. Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien and Bach’s Actus Tragicus stem from a creative attitude toward death that is very close to home one from the other. Thus, it is not by chance that with their listening, both works fill us with peace and the deep sense of rest with which they do it.
In Cantus Horn, the language used is made up of octophone modes made of various structures, which are filtered by the compositional system proposed by Edmond Costere. Introducció i Galop, Op. 148 is an eminently virtuosistic composition for the horn player, but also full of interesting dialogues with the pianist; the Introducció is slow, based on a dodecafonic melody from the start and Galop is fast and virtuosistic. Tientos de la trompa alada (Tientos of the Winged Horn) is inspired by the next to the last verse of the poem by Góngora A Don Francisco de Padilla, castellano de Milán, where there appears a winged horn. Mar sin Luna, In memoriam Javier Bonet Silvestre, this piece, composed as a tribute to Javier Bonet Silvestre, speaks about the tragic theme of suicide. Juegos sobre ‘Tocatico-tocatá’, Games on “Tocatico-tocatá”. Homage to Carles Santos was born. It is a brief chamber work, in which song-like elements of Carles Santos’ work come into play, joined to other suitable ones that are melodic, harmonic and polyphonic. Elegía ponders a narrative that expresses in a cyclical form contrasting thematic sounds and sketches that represent antagonistic situations and states of mind. Consolación is a single movement piece which alternates highly contrasting sections that show the multiple resources that this ensemble can afford. These go from lyrical to energetic, going through rhythmical and scherzando episodes. A piece of great difficulty, in accordance with the technical capabilities of the intended performers.
Palatín belonged to a musical line that dates back to the 18th century and among whose members we find, for example, the creator of the first Spanish musical dictionary. He was born in 1852 in Seville (Spain). From a young age he showed great musical talent and mastery of the violin, so it was consideredwhen he was only 12 years old, that he should continue his studies in what was then the best place to study violin, The Imperial Conservatory of Paris. There, he would study with Jose White and with Jean-Delphin Alard, Pablo Sarasate´s teacher. This would be possible thanks to a scholarship granted by the Excelentísima Diputación de Seville after having won the relevant competition. His compositions include 29 pieces for violin and piano, a concerto for violin and orchestra which is only the second Spanish Romantic concerto for violin as well as works for orchestra, choir, chamber music or solo piano adding up to a total of 89 works.
Fire is what Josu De Solaun shed with his improvisations to the audience of the City of León Auditorium on 13th March 2021. It was an exceptional concert in which improvisations full of warmth and light now have a second life thanks to this album. panDEMiCity is the musical document – the still photo – of a unique event, an unprecedented hic et nunc in the artistic career of the great pianist born in Valencia and raised in New York. Undoubtedly, this is a milestone which makes Josu De Solaun an essential demiurge of the current world improvisation scene. De Solaun’s exuberant idiomaticism, his vast musical background, provokes vertigo in the listener. De Solaun not only pays a moving tribute to Keith Jarrett, but also visits and inhabits the music of numerous composers who have been nesting in his prodigious fingers for decades, such as his favourite composers: Schumann, Janáček, Bartók, Chopin, Brahms, Enescu, Carter, Liszt, Debussy…
Spanish percussionist Noè Rodrigo is one of the most talented musicians of his generation. Having performed all over Europe and the US at most major concert halls and festivals, he has premiered more than 50 pieces by composers of over 20 nationalities. His interpretations of the percussion “classics” have been described by critics and audiences as highly virtuosic, technically impeccable and musically complex while featuring a large palette of colours. With PARAULES, (Words) Rodrigo brings to life seven works by essential composers of the XXth Century: Xenakis, Sciarrino, Mantovani, Denisov, Spanish music never before recorded (Torres and Vallejo) alongside more recent pieces (Borzelli). Seventy minutes where the young artist is able to show a stunning versatility, embracing every aesthetic with intelligence and accuracy, aiming for unique interpretations. If in the beginning music was a verb, like singing, shortly after it became percussion: initially, doubling the prosody of the voice; later, introducing a growing range of rhythms and colours that have made it the most heterogeneous, surprising and multicultural of all the instrumental families. In Sciarrino’s words (PARAULES): ‘a wooden percussion instrument can hardly sing, but at the same time I wonder if it cannot speak, shout, moan or murmur’.
BOOKLET:
Passio Christi
The Opera-Oratorio “Passio Christi” narrates the events of the Lord’s Passion from the Last Supper to the dawn of Resurrection. The story is told through the feelings and emotions of some of the characters who took part in it in various ways: Peter, Judas, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, the Cyrenean, the soldier Longinus and the Angels. Each character sings the verses of the saints and poets of the world in a different language (Italian, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Latin and ancient Greek) to represent the whole world before the mystery of human suffering. The dramatic structure of the Opera follows the ancient structure of the Sacred Representations: in fact, its original form is designed for dramatization and scenic action. The events of the Gospel are interspersed with the arias of the various characters, which constitute a sort of cinematographic “still image”.
On the 20th of August 2022, the centenary of the passing of Felipe Pedrell transpired—an occasion marking the solemn remembrance of the esteemed progenitor of Spanish musical nationalism. The catalogue of musical compositions by Pedrell, established in 1977, comprises a total of 231 titles. In the catalogue of his works, there is a notable emphasis on his interest in art song with accompaniment, serving as the foundation for his musical creations and a key element in his nationalist ideology. His initial compositions for voice and piano date back to 1857, where he endeavours to distance himself from the prevailing trends in Spanish music during his era and align with European musical styles. In this CD, performed by Joan Martín-Royo and Rubén Fernández Aguirre, we can appreciate the enormous quality of Pedrell’s compositions, marked by enormous contrast, the voice and piano accompaniment are superbly treated, and some songs exhibit exotic influences (Arab), at times mysterious and at others romantic. Undoubtedly, a work worthy of being among the most important lyrical repertoire.
Carlos Mena & Manuel Minguillón
Per voi ardo presents a large number of Italian madrigals in the form they are preserved in Spain in the vihuela books of Enríquez de Valderrábano (1547), Diego Pisador (1552) and Miguel de Fuenllana (1554). They are complemented by settings by Alonso Mudarra, original compositions like Milán’s, using Italian texts of the same flavour, and with accompaniments that parallel the arranged madrigals in many ways. Some solo works by Mudarra and Fuenllana offer brief momeThe arrangements by Valderrábano, Pisador and Fuenllana, on the other hand, follow exactly the precedent of the 1536 Willaert-Verdelot collection. They are tablature arrangements of the madrigals without modification that are sung in exactly the way that Verdelot and Willaert envisaged. In the absence of parallel sources in Italy, they are important not only as evidence of the spread of this practice to Spain, but also as the main written evidence that confirms a continuing practice of singing arrangements of 1530s madrigals for decades after they first appeared.
Madrid-born Eduardo Costa Roldán, has premiered more than thirty chamber and symphonic works. Composition of educational materials is one of his main creative concerns. Tempo de Huida and Berlín 1928, two of the works included in this album Perfil del aire, were born with a clear didactic purpose. The other four titles (Diálogo de sombras, Tríptico, Escenas de la vida de Poulenc and Dos imágenes) were commissioned by renowned flautists. However, with the passage of time, they have been established as a regular part of the conservatory repertoire and, some of them have been chosen as examination pieces in educational institutions, national flute competitions or auditions to symphonic ensembles.
Cristina Lucio-Villegas
It is now ten years since he died, and this disc is intended to provide a true homage to and remembrance of the composer from Seville, Manuel Castillo, offering an opportunity to hear a selection of his works for piano, two recorded for the first time (Ofrenda and Para Arthur), along with scores by Turina and Albéniz which provided Castillo with the inspiration and model for the creation of various of his compositions, specifically Turina’s La Andaluza Sentimental, and Navarra, and El Puerto by Albéniz, which can aid the listener in an understanding of the Castillo repertoire presented.
Jorge Robaina
The pianist’s task is extraordinary in terms of the recovery of a heritage but much more because of its artistic beauty. The four titles are multifaceted notebooks, their composers offering contrasting aspects of their beliefs and technique. Deeply involved in the highly cultivated Spanish dances of Pittaluga’s Suite and Bacarisse’s 24 Preludes, surprising with the richness offered in the elaborate wake of Chopin, Mantecón’s delightful album, his major achievement, and the chromatic daring of Bautista, probably related to Messiaen, Robaina deploys a masterly range of touches, timbres and phrasing. They do express the influences as performer but also the demand of a rigorous stylistic quest within this singular repertoire that he absorbs and transforms, perfectly located in a time difficult for spirituality, happily restored to its grandeur by such initiatives.
Asier Polo & Marta Zabaleta
According to Stefan Zweig, for artists in 1900, “belief in irresistible progress had the force of a religion”. However, the word “progress” had different meanings at the turn of this century, seen in the four compositions offered in this recording. Written in little more than twenty years, the four bear witness to the variety of views and richness of colours, ideas and sonorous languages opening the twentieth century, so close in time … so far away. Franck, Glazunov, Rachmaninov, Ravel. Four views, from national affirmation, the beauty of conformism, the design of melancholy or intellectual quest. So close … So far. Asier Polo and Marta Zabaleta. A journey to the depths of the soul.
Raquel Lojendio
Chiky Martin
A true journey through the “Sung Nations” Argentina and Brazil . “I compose music because I love it. I love melodies, I love singing. And I have found out with pleasure that there is a public out there who is very interested in my music whenever I publish it. That’s fantastic! I refuse to just compose music designed to be discovered and understood by future generations”. With these words Carlos Guastavino (Santa Fe, 1912 – Buenos Aires, 2000) expressed himself, aware that his art belonged to those who wanted to hear and sing it, reneging on the customary exercise of the composer who seeks to be recognized by the umpteenth harmonic discovery never before tried out. Guastavino enriched the young voice of the Argentine people with his music, giving it a unique and identifiable tone, supporting the tip of his feet in a folklore to which he gave wings to surpass himself. “Cinco canciones argentinas” (Five Argentinean songs), Op. 10. This work exemplarily shows the most characteristic features of what has come to be known as Ginastera’s period of objective nationalism.
Antonio Galera
A prelude generally precedes something but, in music, it is also a sort of separate piece that itself reveals all its relevance. Some examples are very clear in this album by Antonio Galera which contains more than just preludes. By adding them to the album, Galera creates a kind of implicit and explicit context of historical review about the meaning of a term which is at the same time an announcement, a complement of what is to come (Johann Sebastian Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich) and a unit (Chopin, Scriabin and Rachmaninov). It even serves as a starting point for a more complex formal conception considering thematic or structural aspects (Cesar Franck). Yet, there is another vision of the prelude as a pretext, as a composition whose lack of formality is worth the paradox. This form gives it the possibility of going beyond its possible technical approach, knot and denouement, and its own mechanism.
This is a novel document based on commitment and solidarity. Its most perceptive protagonist is the young pianist Luis González Lladó who, guided by the desire to be coherent with his time, proposed to a heterogeneous group of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American composers the creation of a nucleus of piano works based on the formal model of the prelude, freely reflecting their conception of the aesthetic time in which they were immersed. That proposal formulated in 2017 fostered a significant collective response, to which this phonographic document aims to attest in the first instance with the works and authors selected by the pianist Luis González Lladó himself.
This album contains a collection of works from the Seicento, most of them well known and recorded several times, although it also includes a composition (Cazzati’s La Verità sprezzata) that is little or not very often heard. It is a repertoire to which we have usually devoted ourselves. That is why we wanted to propose our own way of doing it, in all honesty and avoiding fashions and artifice, without pretentiousness, respecting only the rhetorical —and dramatic— discourse implicit in the texts and their setting to music, fleeing from affectation —but not from affetti— and unquestioned customs, taking advantage of the information provided by musicological research, making use of our intuition and experience, and also remembering the teaching we have received from our old masters. Inspired by Ripa’s allegory and by the idea of truth as άλήθεια or unveiling of the self that is hidden by the veil of appearance, we have endowed our performance with a certain natural simplicity, a deliberate nakedness, especially in moments of particular emotional intensity.
Claudio Constantini
Reflets Dans l´Eau is the wonderful first volume of what will become the collection of the complete piano works of Claude Debussy. In his interpretations, pianist Claudio Constantini captures the freshness and spontaneity of the music as if it had been composed yesterday. In this recording, the internationally acclaimed Peruvian pianist (the first Latin-American musician to record the integrale of Debussy piano works) makes use of his profound knowledge, intuition and impecabble technique, bringing to life such well known works as the Images or L´Isle Joyeuse, just as well as lesser known pearls like the Nocturne, Danse or Berceuse Heroique, to name a few. The repertoire selection spans over 25 years of Debussy´s compositional life and offers an excellent opportunity for listeners in getting acquainted with the music of one of the greatest composers in history. The second volume of Debussy works, due in spring 2016, will come as a two cd set and will include the complete Preludes, Estampes, and other piano works.
The meeting and dialogue with the pianist Mario Prisuelos, the poet Pilar Martín Gila and myself, gave shape to a proposal where music and poetry share a common point: the reinterpretation of a past time, that of the Spanish Renaissance. This dialogue between the ancient and the present stems from essential voices: among others, Tomás Luis de Victoria, Francisco Guerrero, Cristóbal de Morales or Sebastián de Vivanco. The work is written for piano and electronics, where the latter is conceived as a spatial extension of the instrument. There is also a thematic character in the choice of Renaissance works, all of them of a funereal nature, mostly Versa est in luctum, an aspect that conceptually vertebrates the piano cycle and envelops it in a specific type of poetic spectrum. The poet and musician Ildefonso Rodríguez writes, in relation to this presence in the work: “There is never darkness, there is nothing sinister, the ancient choirs are in place, as in a vault painted by Fra Angelico […] No, the light of the story is not dark, it is twilight beauty, its reverberation”.
Mario Prisuelos
The 20th century, the century of totalitarianism, has undoubtedly been marked by the horror of mass, industrialized crime. The world of music, like any other, could not have been oblivious to the ominous events brought by, as Karl Popper would say, the enemies of open society. Accordingly, we find a wide range of attitudes, from musicians of unwavering affinity towards totalitarian regimes, to those who were ousted, or in the worst of cases, even murdered by their compatriots in power. None of the three composers present on this album are at any of the extremes mentioned, but their respective biographies were indelibly marked by Soviet repression or National Socialism, or at worst by both. Beyond these historical circumstances, the great success of Mario Prisuelos in making this programme has been to detect how the three works he has chosen for his recording, written in a time interval of approximately a quarter of a century, are exemplary in terms of reflecting certain aesthetic changes of his time. (José L.Besada)
Roberto Aussel
Paths, encounters, surprises, joys, sorrows, gratitude and an infinite space for research have been the components which led me to express in the present recording the feelings this music conveys to me. Europe, Buenos Aires and La Pampa it is a tribute to Astor Piazzolla by a European composer. The music from Buenos Aires and La Pampa harmonize in this record to express the soul of music. As Atahualpa Yupanqui said, a journey is made of endless arrivals. Discovering each of these pieces has given me an enormous motivation to learn and follow new paths, like a true channel telling a musical story. It is as if it were a very long trail. When you walk through it from a point to another to know and explore it, you find rest, you long to walk again to reach a new resting point and to start again. Roberto Aussel’s style is recognizable from his first notes by the warm sounding and the persuasion of his touch. He was born on July 13, 1954 in La Plata, Argentina. He took his first steps with the guitar under the guidance of Norberto Piedrabuena. At this stage he learnt the basics of classical guitar technique and came into contact with the different airs of Argentinean folk music.
Roberto Sierra
Juan Carlos Garvayo
When I sit down at the piano to dialogue with the music of my great friend Roberto, I have the feeling that it much resembles that ineffable music which, once dreamed, inevitably vanishes, leaving just a light perfume as a guide to our longing to trail it at all cost. The eight pieces in the First Album of Boleros –of which I am the proud dedicatee– and the four Montunos, their antagonists so to speak, belong to that sphere of music (of poetry) where the real and unreal fuse with precision in a captivating message; an absolutely personal sound world, unique and complex, offering at once the qualities of immediacy and accessibility for the listener. These qualities are however never displayed gratuitously because they are, above all, an essential part of Roberto’s inevitable need to communicate a music always resonating inside him, a music anchored in the earth, in childhood, where certainly our most intimate dreams are forged. Puerto Rican to the core, he places all his overwhelming skills, all his extraordinary musical knowledge, at the service of these dreams, to salvage them and relive them generously with us; from the immense tenderness distilling the dream world of the Boleros to the rhythmic power of the Montunos or the implacable ferocity of Introducción, Canción and Descarga.
Pedro Rojas Ogáyar
The relationship between composers and performers has been a key element in musical creation. This is the case of the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo (Sagunto, Valencia, 1901 – Madrid, 1999), who was acquainted with many prominent guitarists of his time (e.g. Emilio Pujol, Andrés Segovia, Narciso Yepes, Regino Sainz de la Maza, Pepe Romero, to name but a few). As a result of these interactions, one of the most internationally known solo guitar repertoires was created, thus making the guitar thoroughly accepted as a solo instrument with orchestra, with his C oncierto de Aranjuez (1939), Fantasía para un gentilhombre (1954), and Concierto madrigal (1966) being some of the best known. These works for guitar and orchestra are the most well-known of his catalogue and Joaquín Rodrigo owes his fame to them. However, in this album, the protagonists are other works, which, despite being less well-known, are no less relevant and have equally exalted the Spanish guitar repertoire.
Vandalia & Ars Atlántica
Among the Spanish sources from the first third of the seventeenth century, the Cancionero de la Sablonara holds a very special place. It was prepared between 1625 and 1626 for a German noble, Wolfang Wilhelm, who held, among other titles of nobility, those of count palatine and duke of Neoburg and who had visited the court in Madrid between October 1624 and May 1625. This aristocratic music lover showed enthusiasm for the secular vocal music he heard at the court and, at the end of his trip, requested an anthology for his personal pleasure; it was compiled and copied with great care and beautiful calligraphy by Claudio de la Sablonara, main scriptor—copyist—of the Royal Chapel. The collection contains seventy-five pieces, including “the best songs that are sung in this court,” according to the compiler. This important source, preserved at Munich’s Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, features poems in Spanish and Italian metric forms.
Alberto Urroz
The musical richness of Scarlatti’s sonatas has already produced memorable performances at the harpsichord as well as at the piano, and both options will remain open for sure in the future. Eva Badura-Skoda, in her recent 2017 book The Eighteenth-Century Fortepiano Grand and Its Patrons, underlines once more the option to consider both the harpsichord and the piano, even the modern piano, as suitable instruments to play Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas. Just like Johann Sebastian Bach’s works for keyboard, Scarlatti’s pieces, Badura-Skoda says, can sound convincing in any instrument, provided that each performer may have the training, the taste and the sensitivity to recreate the proper language, sound and aesthetic for that music. Alberto Urroz, one of the most brilliant pianists of his generation, faces in this recording the challenge to explore his own selection and version of some of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas, inviting us to enjoy a repertoire that is always attractive and inspiring, from which every great performer knows how to extract new nuances, subtleties and perspectives.
La Tempestad & Silvia Márquez
Imagine how the rhythmic emphasis of Scarlatti’s sonatas sounds on other instruments, beyond the harpsichord or other keyboards, can be a temptation difficult to overcome. It was difficult for us and it must have been, too, for those who had in their hands some of the hot manuscripts, fresh out of the oven, in the eighteenth century. Because, in this point, a new mystery emerges: what happened to all those acquaintances that Scarlatti had the opportunity to find in Rome or Venice? Did he keep in contact with other European composers, such as Thomas Roseingrave, once at the service of the court in Madrid? What happened to the bridges built with London? How is it possible that some of the sonatas that today are only preserved in the manuscript of Venice were known in England as early as 1744 (even before)?.
In addition to the interpretive values of the great fortepianist Yasuyo Yano, listening the Schubert’s Fortepiano sonatas on an original instrument, always has enormous added value. Second volume of Franz Schubert’s Sonatas for Fortepiano in which Yasuyo Yano chooses two of the greatest sonatas: No. 19 in C Minor and No. 7 in E-flat Major. The Sonata in C minor, D. 958 is characteristic of Schubert’s feeling of retreat. Towards the end, the movement rushes ever more quietly towards silence, before two brute final chords conclude this grandiose sonata. The Sonata in E-flat major, D. 568, begins with a thoughtfully cautious Unsiono. This rapturous mood is soon interrupted by a brisk transition, only to culminate in a swaying waltz-sweetness composed with supple chromaticism. The themes and their lively interplay always reveal a melancholy mood.
Yasuyo Yano
From the elated dream to the bitter reality: to provide a proper rendering of Franz Schubert’s music, with its enormous range of expressions including all the intermediate tones, the instrument of choice must be the Fortepiano, if only for its similitude to the pianos used during Schubert’s lifetime. The model used in the present recording is based on the grand piano of the Viennese master Conrad Graf, an instrument that Schubert himself owned. Its six pedals allow Schubert’s music to be played with multifaceted pliancy and depth. The skillful use of all these pedals, which in modern instruments have been reduced to two or three, opens up a multitude of sound facettes, similar to doors that open up to a multitude of rooms, each decorated in its own particular way and with its own particular style.
Mariano García
Aniana Jaime
Six sound sculptures of the ephemeral art of sounds tinged with the colour and the renewed light of modernity transmitted by the saxophone”. Music is an ephemeral art, unseizable, which must be recreated by performers time and time again here and now to be listened to and contemplated as it vanishes once more. When immortalising music in this CD, we feel we have created sound sculptures; our interpretation has become solid to leave six “sculpted” masterpieces of the ephemeral art of sounds. All the pieces included in this CD were originally composed for other instruments (violin, viola, clarinet, voice and piano). When interpreted with the saxophone, we stamp them with a new colour; a renewed light of modernity inundates these masterpieces of the chamber music repertoire of all times.
The album Se hace saber (Let it be known) by the Valencian horn player María Rubio shows off the modern instrument in its purest essence without forgetting its history, displaying the huge range of sonorous and artistic options that it has to offer solo or together with rather unconventional colleagues. All in all, a very Mediterranean contemporary portrait of the horn in the XXI century through the visions of eight national and international composers.
BOOKLET:
This recording charts a path through the sonatas for violin and basso continuo composed by eight composers born in Italy, the epicentre of the genre’s experimentation at the time. Most of these composers were also violin virtuosos, true explorers and connoisseurs of their instrument, and several enjoyed an international career that led them to publish beyond the Alps. One of the recording’s key unifying elements is the exploration of the D minor key, with the only exception of two sonatas in the neighbouring D major and A major keys, three particularly idiomatic tonalities that favour the instrument’s natural resonance.
Iñaki Alberdi
The accordion – an instrument of our present time – creates new life thanks to its colors, its timbres, its vast range, its complex polyphonies, and its contrasting or progressive dynamics – but primarily due to its capacity to breathe air and life into sound. This compact disc is a journey to my past, to my origins, and to my special relation with this repertoire. It features music firmly anchored in tradition, and it proposes different ways of getting to know the accordion: its means of expression, its origins as an instrument. Thus, throughout this journey, we have become acquainted with a series of musical viewpoints from the vantage point of the accordion: different ways of viewing the orchestra, the piano, the organ, the harmonium, the harpsichord and, finally, the bandoneon. Nevertheless, despite all those angles, the accordion only seeks to sound like itself. That is the best way it can make its own contribution to these original creations: by providing its most genuine characteristics instead of attempting to imitate the natural qualities of other instruments. The different periods, aesthetics and materials employed by the authors give me the opportunity to show myself as I am, remaining faithful to my musical roots – knowing and realizing that the source of inspiration for those roots lies first and foremost in the music itself, rather than in a certain instrumental perspective.
Tonality abolished or tonality diluted? – this was the dilemma that conditioned twentieth century musical creation. Dmitri Shostakovich bequeathed us a document of the greatest musical and historical value: the 24 Preludes and Fugues Opus 87, written for piano in 1950 and 1951 as homage to Johann Sebastian Bach, choosing the path of evolution and not the crossroads of rupture. Without foregoing his aesthetic credos, Shostakovich offers a discourse which is singularly up to date and where tonality and modality are not seen as being in conflict but rather as the adhesive of a renewed discourse, ranging from the paradigms of historical reason to the new hypotheses of a freely expressive musical language.
Sofya Melikyan
With this recording Sofya Melikyan introduces us to composers who seem marked by some historical design in which the momentous events of their countries of origin, and the magic of figures, have somehow crisscrossed and interwoven. As such, these three women represent countries that underwent tremendous upheavals a century ago. Kaija Saariaho’s native Finland gained its independence in 1917, which was the same year and with almost the same historic circumstances that shattered the social foundations of Russia, Sofia Gubaidulina’s country of origin (although she was actually a Tatar), in that case resulting in the October Revolution of 1917. The third composer, Geghuni Chitchyan’s country is Armenia, which achieved its first period of modern independence in early 1918, also as a result of the dramatic events that shook that part of the world in 1917. These three women are joined by a young Venezuelan, Raquel Quiaro, who settled in Spain over twenty years ago, and is one of Kaija Saariaho ‘s most outstanding pupils.
With this album Soinuzko begiradak – TAKE 2, the members of the Zukan Trio continue to demonstrate that they are much more than three extraordinarily virtuoso musicians who approach contemporary music with rigour, energy and enthusiasm. None of them limit themselves to playing their own instruments, but act as multi-instrumentalists of infinite and interdisciplinary possibilities. This versatility and this common way of understanding sound and artistic career, without historical cushions and guided by an unwavering commitment to current creation, especially Spanish, makes them unique and difficult to imitate. And, for this reason, the Zukan Trio and the new paths they open for us will leave their mark on history.
Lazhar Cherouana
We are offered a musical tour of the Spanish and Spanish American guitar. Included are works by authors representing a wide typology, from the short piece to the grand sonata which, in one way or another, are related to Andalucia and some, specifically, to Granada. The title chosen for this recording comes from the second piece of Estampes (1903) by Claude Debussy, who becomes the leitmotif of this project. Soirée dans Grenade refers to afternoons recording in the Nogal baths of the city (Hamman to Yauza) or Bañuelo, an impressive vestige of the Arab past of the city (C11), which surrounds us with columns, arches, vaults and fanciful starry- shaped octagonal skylights. These elements give the recording a sound ambiance of crisp, precise reverberation, and on occasions, the distant singing of birds that seem to accompany the guitar. There, the spring sun fades in the skylights until the room is left in complete darkness, flooded by the guitar of Lazhar Cherouana, where there is only the music of Falla, Turina, Rodrigo … Soirée dans Grenade is also the work that inaugurated the series which Debussy composed, inspired by Spain, resulting in Iberia (Images pour Orchestre, II, 1905-8) and La Puerta del Vino (Preludes, II, 1913). These compositions in some way anticipate the sound atmosphere of the works contained in the present recording up to the textuality: a motif of the Soirée appears cited at the end of the Homenaje (Homage) that Manuel de Falla devoted to the French musician.
Joan Enric Lluna
Orquesta Comunidad Valencia Palau de las Arts
In many ways it was Joaquín Rodrigo’s own work that eclipsed the vast majority of what he composed. The international success of Concierto de Aranjuez has meant that much of the rest of his work remains relatively unknown. With this in mind, it is interesting to note that Rodrigo is one of the twentieth century’s most prolific Spanish composers, with a huge opus of around 170 works awaiting rediscovery. He is, therefore, much more than just the composer of the Concierto de Aranjuez. This CD is a step along the path to bringing the composer’s other music to the public’s attention. Rodrigo had very close ties with the European Neoclassicism of the nineteen thirties which sought inspiration in the classical musical tradition. In this sense, although folkloric elements are certainly present in his music, what differentiates the composer is his ability to focus his attention on the tradition of Spanish classical music. It is this which marks him out so significantly from the generations of earlier composers who tended to seek inspiration in popular music.
Pedro Pablo Cámara Toldos
This CD aims to compile the most emblematic works of the end of the twentieth century while seeking to give more recent music a leading role because, fortunately, some of today’s creators are of the same quality as the most firmly-established figures of the previous period. This is not work about the flutter-tonguing “traditional contemporary saxophone”, display of the shallowest virtuosity, an accumulation of slaps or “strident multiphonics” used as effects, and which have been made an example of our feeblest “clichés”. Quite the contrary, the intention has been to select a programme where various styles coexist while seeking to keep in common the use the individual composers make of the saxophone, of course using E.Ts., although never as techniques themselves but rather with the aim of offering a message, part of the differentiated language of each. This is the main feature of the current panorama, the quest for a sonic language original to each composer, using the saxophone as the medium, never as the beginning or end of the composition.
Trio Arbós
During a period o f seven years (1931-1930), three masterpieces were written for a chamber ensemble, the piano quartet, for which there were barely any examples in the history of Spanish music:
The “Seconda Sonata Concertata a Quattro”, International Chamber Prize of Bruxels (Julian Bautista), Her Majesty Belgian Queen Elisabeth its dedicatee, is a major, forceful work, impetuously, overwhelming, evoking a degree of Stravinskyan primitivism or tinged with southern elegance. Incisive rhythms, obsessive melodic intervals and caustic harmonies flow into a sort of disfigured lyricism whose main theme alternates the instruments of the ensemble in dialogue form. Joaquín Turina conceived his Quartet in terms of purity of concept, both in the elegantly engraved melodic ideas and in the perfectly balanced instrumentation, no player ancillary or redundant. As part of the neoclassical aesthetic predominant in southern Europe, the Remacha’s Piano Quartet Op.67 formal structure is clear, ordered, its three movements designed around pure classical forms par excellence. Influences may be made out here and there of the neoclassical Stravinsky in the formal precision, incisive rhythms and sharp-edged gestures, and some taste for malevolent dissonance.
Guillermo Pastrana & Daniel Blanch
At the beginning of the 20th century in Catalunya, several approaches to music lived side by side, some succeeding and overlapping each other: a German-influenced post-romanticism, of Wagnerian tradition; a Spanish nationalism, promoted by Felip Pedrell; and a “novecentist” style which sought to reconnect with the truest traditional roots, crystallizing into a language of great originality. All these aesthetic approaches co-existed naturally and became entwined in the works of composers whose language was constantly evolving. Within this musical context, the artistic lives began of three important Catalan composers of three consecutive generations: Joan Manén (1883-1971), Robert Gerhard (1896-1970) and Xavier Montsalvatge (1912 -2002): composers whose extensive output has been performed and received international recognition, and who set out to find their own personal voice from the starting points of different musical styles.
ALBERTO URROZ, piano
The six works selected by Alberto Urroz for this recording comprise some of the finest Spanish contributions to the universal piano literature. All were composed in a period of seventy years (1851-1921) which proved to be key in the evolution of piano language from romanticism to modernity, a time when Spanish piano music constituted a reference for the romantic Spain dreamed of by writers and poets. Albéniz, Granados and Falla represent the culmination of this nationalist and evocative piano, its roots sunk in the essence of popular Spanish music, but recreated in a modern language of the greatest quality.
Iagoba Fanlo & Pablo Amorós
On November 11, 1930 the composer Gustavo Pittaluga formally presented in Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes the «Manifesto de los Ocho», introducing what would later be known as the «Generación del 27» and thus securing a fraternal bond with the vigorous poetic movement in full bloom at the time in Spain which, however, would be dramatically dispersed and silenced in 1939 with the advent of general Franco’s backward and bloody dictatorship. The forward-thinking group of musicians known as el «Grupo de los Ocho» (alluding to the French «Les Six»), with Salvador Bacarisse, Julián Bautista, Rosa García Ascot, Ernesto and Rodolfo Halffter, Juan José Mantecón, Fernando Remacha and Pittaluga himself at its core, took up as its cause to accept Falla’s legacy and to combine Spanish music with contemporary European avant-garde currents while embracing a newly-forged nationalism that likewise drew inspiration from the distant past of composers such as Cabanilles, Victoria, Sanz, Scarlatti, and Soler. Almost all members of this generation –also known as the Generation of the Republic– went into exile at the end of Spain’s «Uncivil War» in 1939.
Diego Arias & Yu-Jung-Chung
Is an exciting new addition to the repertoire. It is characterized by spicy, zesty Latin rhythms juxtaposed with soaring lyrical melodies hugely influenced by jazz. The music is both accessible and sophisticated. A melodious trumpet part, an animated accompaniment featuring toe-tapping rhythms, some flashy mallet playing, and the influences of the jazz and Latin idioms will go a long way to ensure the success of this piece.”
Trio Arbós
Three years after Granados premiered his Trio in Madrid, his admired friend, Joaquín Malats, whom he had known since they were fellow students in Barcelona of the great piano composer, Juan Bautista Pujol, premiered his Trio in B-flat at the Madrid Athenaeum. Music of exquisite, elegant, and fresh refinement, constant in flight and resounding in inspiration, condenses in its three movements all the creative potential of a musician who died prematurely at 40 years of age. Pedrell himself confesses in the first person his weakness for Chopin in his first period as a composer: “In the year 1872, the chronic nocturnitis from which I suffered, and which was influenced by Chopin and Field, worsened, and I published, almost at the same time, two Nocturnos (in G minor and A major). After a month of intense work, the Trio in C Major op. 50 of Enrique Granados premiered on 22 February 1895, at the Salón Romero in Madrid, the favourite haunt of Madrid’s chamber evenings, as the culmination of a programme dedicated entirely to the music of Granados that included his Quintet and several pieces for piano. The present recording has been made using exclusively the manuscript of the Trio in C Major op. 50, held in the Museum of Music of Barcelona. The difference with the existing editions of the work and with the recordings based on those texts is more than notable.
Alejandro Bustamante
In the present disc I’ve wanted to give voice to four generations of excellent Spanish composers with works written in the last half century. From Rodolfo Halffter, born in Madrid in 1900 and deceased in Mexico in 1987, to María José Arenas, who was born in Isla Cristina (Huelva) in 1983, and is therefore representative of my generation. Eight composers from four generations covering a wide range of styles and showing very different creative paths that the four strings of a violin can inspire. To prepare the recording I have enjoyed the generous support and invaluable assistance of the six alive composers, with whom I have worked hard to be able to perform their works as closely as possible as they were conceived. To them all my warmest thanks for their time and their inspiration.
Stabat Mater
The composer of the Stabat Mater presented in this sound recording was musically educated in Malaga Cathedral at the end of the first third of the 19th century. The musical chapel of the city’s first tempo had already suffered the onslaught of the yellow fever of 1803 and the French invasion during the Napoleonic invasion (1808-1814), and had yet to receive the lethal blows of the successive disentailment measures of Mendizábal (1836), Espartero (1841) and Madoz (1854). However, what seemed to put an end to the stable ensemble to solemnise cathedral liturgies was paradoxically giving way to a paradigm shift.
Carlos Álvarez (baritone) Lourdes Martin (soprano) Luis Pacetti (tenor) Alba Chantar (soprano) Costanza Ávila (mezzosoprano) Coro Catedral de Málaga (choir) Orquesta Filarmónica de Málaga Antonio del Pino (conductor)
Bambú Ensemble was expressly created as a string octet and its players are trained in the careful cultivation of the distinguishing features of their literature – from Mendelssohn or Gade to more contemporary offerings. On this album, therefore, they demonstrate an intuitive and eloquent ability to deliver not only the cyclical-thematic density of the massive symphonic structure in nine interconnected themes that is the magnificent Octet composed by a precocious and utterly inspired Enescu, but also the exceptional academic exercise in counterpoint that displays the skill and brilliance of the young Shostakovich, and the nocturnal garden of multiple textures woven around a single motif created by Javier Martínez Campos, transferring the concept of counterpoint from the thematic or motivic to the terrain of experimentation in timbre and sound.
“Imitar col canto chi parla” (“imitating in song one who speaks”): that ideal, expressed by Jacopo Peri in the preface to his setting of Euridice, heralded a veritable revolution in vocal music, beginning with the experiments, towards the end of the sixteenth century, of the Florentine Camerata – a group of intellectuals and musicians led by Count Giovanni de’ Bardi, who aimed to revive the glorious art of ancient Greek tragedy. According to written accounts, the latter was sung, or spoken, in such a way that the words, while remaining intelligible at all times, were emotionally heightened. The members of the Camerata wished thus to break with the polyphonic madrigal tradition of the Renaissance and turn to accompanied monody, recitar cantando, thereby returning to the pre-eminence of the word as the means of conveying human emotions, with the music, henceforth subordinate to speech, serving to magnify and amplify it.
The third protagonist of the series MUSIC & WORDS by Facundo Agudín and Musique des Lumières, in collaboration with Ibs Classical, is the Russian- American writer of Jewish origin Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize. Musique des Lumières has commissioned six works from five composers from very different backgrounds who, inspired by Brodsky’s texts, use music to honour this uncompromising intellectual and key figure in world literature.
BOOKLET:
ROGER MORELLÓ has intercalated three sarabands from the Suites for Cello Solo by Johann Sebastian Bach. The first is the one included in the Suite No. 1, whose prelude served as primary material for the work by Marc Migó. The second saraband that appears is the one from the Suite No. 2, which is in the key of D minor, and the third is the E flat major saraband. Along with these pieces, we encounter the Suite for Cello Solo by Gaspar Cassadó – a renowned Casals pupil and one of the most legendary violoncellists of the twentieth century as well as a composer. Along with this piece, Morelló has added his cello arrangement of an original work for viola da gamba from Les voix humaines by Marin Marais, which is the piece that lends this album its title.
Mario Prisuelos
Tomás Marco deconstructs reality to recompose it and return it interpreted and transformed in a work of art, achieving what Hegel denominated “the sensitive appearance of the idea”, that is, knowledge, which “puts man before himself” and makes of art “a experience that transforms whom experiments it” (Gadamer, Truth and Method) and which, unlike Nietzsche, for whom his time was not radically “his time”, philosophically places him in the time he has to live. Tomás Marco is a man of his time that cultivates, explores and scrutinises with his look that is always critic and never free from enriching eagerness. He fulfils what his time demands him and, as a result, his work is developing as one of the historical reasons of our time.
Jonathan Mesonero
Trascendo is a thrilling journey through that unknown dimension that blurs the contours of pain and then, guided by a wonderful repertoire for violin solo, heaven and earth come closer. The violinist composers who wrote the four intense, vibrant masterpieces of Trascendo give us their immense talent to show that beyond life there is music. Jonathan Mesonero gives us much more than a virtuous and masterful performance. Few musicians have the gift not to read, but to breathe the score, physically and mentally. He breathes the notes as if they were oxygen that sometimes enters lightly while some other times it is so pure it even hurts. He processes the bars in his bloodstream by sending them to each nerve ending until he becomes one with his violin to transform those notes into sounds full of magic. Listening to him means feeling. Is it not feeling, feeling intensely, what we all look for in music? In a time driven by flat images of perfect unreality, Trascendo is a tribute to our imperfect humanity, to our condition as mere mortals who sometimes are able to sublimate feelings until they become a pulse of the soul that is able to break through the barriers of this world.
The Reverón Piano Trio’s main goal is to introduce audiences to underrepresented music from Latin America alongside contemporary and standard repertoire. These artists are active promoters of Latin American music through their work as performing artists, scholars and entrepreneurs, and they have devoted their careers to the discovery, cataloging, performance, editing, and recording of this rich repertoire. In addition, the trio continues to commission new works, and is in the process of creating the Sphinx Catalog of Latin American Piano Trios. The three composers of this album, Villa-Lobos, Turina and Ponce were born within 5 years of each other. Manuel Ponce’s Trio Romántico, Joaquín Turina’s Piano Trio No. 1, and Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Piano Trio No. 1 were composed within fifteen years of one another in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and representing Mexico, Spain, and Brazil but also outside influences.
Ángel Soria
In the aftermath of the 20th century, it seems that Berlioz’s old prophecy has been finally fulfilled. He saw in the saxophone the spring of sound of “unheard of effects until now”. Furthermore, unlike other instruments of more deep-rooted tradition, the saxophone is open nowadays to many and unsuspected possibilities. Good evidence of this claim is the program brought together here by Angel Soria. Six recent pieces within a time period of two decades (the oldest one goes back to the year 2000), written by composers of different aesthetics (despite all of them belonging to what it is generally called the avant-garde), define the plurality of the aesthetic and expressive options offered by the saxophone. The “truth” of the saxophone is neither unequivocal nor one-dimensional. Instead, it includes many truths that reflect, in a wide range, the complexity of the current times.
This integral represents a great journey through the artistic career of the distinguished Andalusian composer Joaquín Turina. From the romantic flavor of the Trio in F, a youthful work, but it already shows a commendable panache. The Trio no.1, dedicated to Her Royal Highness the Infanta Dña. Isabel de Borbón, awarded at the Spanish National Music Competition. The Trio Nº2 was composed in 1933. Its premiere took place on November 17, 1933 at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) by the Dutch Trio. And the last, Trio Círculo, a work that has always conquered both the public and the performers: it describes the evolution of the day from dawn to twilight. The players are international soloists, as well as members of RTVE Orchestra, professor in Conservatory Superior of Sevilla and Musikene.
Randolph Kelly & John Novacek
Three fundamental works in the repertoire for viola and piano: the Arpeggione Sonata by Franz Schubert, the Viola Sonata Op.11 No4 by the violist and composer Paul Hindemith, and the Viola Sonata by Mikhail Glinka. Randolph Kelly has enjoyed a distinguished and multifaceted career as a soloist, chamber musician, and principal orchestral player. Mr. Kelly has appeared on some of the most prestigious concert stages in the world, including performing the New York premiere of Sir Michael Tippet’s Triple Concerto in Carnegie Hall, conducted by André Previn. Mr. Kelly is widely known for his tenure as Principal Violist of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for 42 years. He was rst engaged by André Previn in 1976, and has since played under the direction of Lorin Maazel, Mariss Jansons, and Manfred Honeck. John Novacek is a much sought-after collaborative artist and has performed with Joshua Bell, Matt Haimovitz, Leila Josefowicz, Cho-Liang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Truls Mork, Elmar Oliveira and Emmanuel Pahud, and, as well as the Colorado, Harrington, Jupiter, New Hollywood, St. Lawrence, SuperNova and Ying string quartets. John Novacek took top prizes at both the Leschetizky and Joanna Hodges international piano competitions, among many others.
Joan Enric Lluna
Berliner Camerata
In the first of his two great concertos for clarinet, Weber’s operatic style is evident from the dramatic start in the form of a tragic aria. The delightful final rondo, in the style of an opera buffa cavatina, is preceded by a slow movement that is a clear reminder that Weber was a relative by marriage of Mozart. Not only was Constanze Weber’s famous husband (already enjoying legendary status) the role model for Weber’s father when he set out to make his son a prodigy, but Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto K.622 formed the foundation for much of 19th-century composition for the instrument. The second of his clarinet concertos, in E flat major, is a marked contrast to the first; the more symphonic wind of the first movement is structured in a much more classical style, while still demonstrating the coloraturas and virtuosic leaps and runs of the soloist. Weber composed his only two symphonies at the age of twenty, between 1806 and 1807, while he was at the Court of Karlsruhe in the service of the Duke Eugen of Württemberg-Öls.
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