A fascinating concert of 20th century masterworks

40 Years of Contemporary Music: Chamber works by Villa-Lobos, Ginastera, Webern, Terzian, Berio, Boulez, Schreker

Alicia Terzian begins a fascinating program of contemporary chamber music with one of the great works of Brazilian modernism, the Seventh Choros of Heitor Villa-Lobos, written in 1924. The 37-year-old composer spent most of that year in Paris, rubbing shoulders with Ravel, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and others, though he also brought with him his own strongly modernist works he'd written in Brazil. 1924 was a banner year for modernism on both sides of the Atlantic, by the way, with the publication of both Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil and André Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme (though as Desmond Morris notes in his recent Lives of the Surrealists, the tone-deaf Breton wasn't interested in adding musicians to his group). It's refreshing to see Villa-Lobos in this modernist company, rather than the parrots-and-jungle exoticism that usually surrounds him. This is a marvellous version of this work, as well. It's subtitled "Settimino" (which means "Septet"), and it's written for flute, oboe, cello, clarinet, alto saxophone, bassoon, tam-tam and violin. I counted twice, and both times I got 8 instead of 7. I figure the tam-tam isn't counted, like when Ringo plays the tambourine. They're still the Fab Four.



Alberto Ginastera's Pampeana no. 2 for cello & piano comes from 1950, and thus is written in what he called his Subjective Nationalism style, a transition between with folkloric Objective Nationalism of his early years and the avant-garde Neo-Expressionism he worked in after 1958. This is an appealing piece, with Latin rhythms becoming insistently astringent and abstract. It's a fine bridge between the Latin American works and those of the Europeans later in the program.

The 8 Early Songs, a work without opus number by Anton Webern, is the earliest on this program. It's from 1901-04, and shows the strong influence of Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf. Soprano Marta Blanco and pianist Claudio Espector are effective advocates for these marvellous, slightly naive but always characterful songs. I hadn't heard this music before, and I'm so grateful that it was included on this disc.

Marta Blanco is also featured in the version for voice and five instruments of Luciano Berio's O King, written in response to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968. I recently reviewed a fine recording from Seattle of O King in its extended version for eight voices and orchestra, and it's fascinating to hear a kind of essential distillation of this landmark work, which is all kinds of bleak, but ultimately somewhat hopeful.

Dérive by Pierre Boulez is the same kind of puzzle music that Bach and Mozart delighted in. He shifts and shuffles around a six-note chord among six instruments, and by changing the intervals derives new chords (hence the name). After five derivations, the original chord returns, and then fades into silence. At the highest level of sophistication one can hear and follow along these changes; if not one can puzzle them out while following along with the score. The rest of us might be content with the general idea that there are basic transformations happening, while enjoying the ornate decorations

Alicia Terzian contributes two works to the program. Yagua Ya Yuca for percussion is five minutes of ingenious sounds, alternately wistful and intense. Les Yeux Fertiles for voice and five instruments, is a setting of fragments of poems by Paul Eluard, serious mood pieces all.

Franz Schreker's Der Wind was written in 1909 as a ballet, though it was never performed in his lifetime. It's an occasionally jolly but ultimately sadly nostalgic piece, untroubled by the more experimental modernism of his contemporary Arnold Schoenberg. This work is a fine ending to a fascinating concert of twentieth century masterworks.

Masterworks from the Ginastera Year and beyond

Alberto Ginastera: Piano Concerto no. 1; Concierto argentino; Variaciones concertantes

The Ginastera Centennial of 2016 has to be counted a success, judging by a decent uptick in both recordings and live performances around the world. The reputation of the master from Buenos Aires is as high as it ever was, and I think it's clear that only Villa-Lobos and Chavez are in his league among the greatest of Latin American composers. The first two volumes of this Chandos series of Orchestral Works were highlights from the Centennial year, but the masterworks keep coming in this new disc, due June 1, 2018. Actually, two of the pieces were recorded in late 2016, so we have the Ginastera Year to thank for this release as well!

Ginastera is one of those composers who was careful to suppress his juvenilia, so we're lucky that the Concerto argentino of 1935, written when he was only 18, is still around. There's a grand, reckless abandon to this music, and the young composer's abundant melodic gifts are clear, even if the piece tends to occasionally slack off, and then move off in another direction in lieu of developing what's happened before, like a young hound who loses and then catches again what may (or may not!) be the scent. He could easily have been under the spell of Villa-Lobos's contemporary folkloric works, if not his more modernist piano works of the 1920s, though if there's an influence really apparent here, it's George Gershwin. This is slight music, but fun, and worth a listen.

We're in a different world with the Variaciones concertantes of 1953, both in terms of quality and of the first layer of abstraction that comes with Ginastera's move from "Objective" to "Subjective Nationalism" as a compositional style. I'm always uncomfortable with the term "orchestral showpiece", since there are musical reasons other than showing off compositional, and by extension instrumental, virtuosity, in this kind of brilliant concerto for orchestra. Look closely at a Velasquez painting and you'll see stupendous feats of virtuoso painting, but it's the overall effect of the work, and not the shiny bits, that really count. Kudos to the players of the BBC Philharmonic for their polished presentation of all the ingenious bright passages, but also to conductor Juanjo Mena for keeping them on task in the presentation of a vital and interesting musical journey.

The 1961 Piano Concerto no. 1 is the real masterwork on this disc, and it receives a stand-out performance from Xiayin Wang and the BBC Philharmonic under Juanjo Mena. It's the first of Ginastera's works from his third "Neo-Expressionist" phase, which began with his move from Argentina to Europe. While his new music shows a certain pulling away or abstraction from folkloric content, Ginastera uses the sophisticated compositional tools of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg to intensify his emotional responses to the same rhythms and landscapes of the pampas and the streetscapes of Buenos Aires that always drove his music. This is among the greatest of all American concerted works with piano, to go along with Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras no. 3 and his Choros no. 11 and a certain work called Rhapsody in Blue.

Passionate, ultra-Romantic, gorgeous music

Tango Under the Stars: Piazzolla, Schifrin, Ginastera [Amazon.ca link]

Blu-ray with a large-screen HD TV and surround-sound was made for concerts like this. Recorded live on August 2, 2016 for NPR's Great Performances, this is a delight from beginning to end. There's a real sense of presence at a significant event, and the LA Philharmonic respond with standout playing. The crowd is into this program completely; they're especially enamoured of guitarist Angel Romero, looking fabulous in his many-coloured shirt. Dudamel, as always, is a charismatic figure, but he's often the still, calm centre when things get exciting with the dancing of Tango Buenos Aires and the always inventive orchestration of three great composers from Argentina. Ginastera's Dances from Estancia have the odd hint of modernism, but remain accessible; their rhythms are often much more complex than the tangos and milongas of the rest of the program, but Dudamel and his superb musicians handle them with ease. Lalo Schifrin brings his entire musical life into his Concierto de la Amistad, which receives its world premiere here. Schifrin played piano in Piazzolla's band in Paris in 1955; he worked with Dizzy Gillespie later in the 50s; and he became a household name with his film and movie scores with a huge filmography in the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st. It was great to hear the audience's response when Dudamel brought him out after the Concierto, and touching to see Schifrin, Dudamel and Romero hugging. Music by Astor Piazzolla begins and ends the program, with fabulous support from the dancers of Tango Buenos Aires and Seth Asamow on bandoneon. This passionate, ultra-Romantic, gorgeous music is just the thing to watch in the evening after a hard day reviewing Arnold Schoenberg.

A tale of two composers

It's great to see the second volume in Chandos' Ginastera Orchestral Works series so soon after the first (which came out early in 2016), in celebration of the Centennial Year, which continues in fine form on record. This disc, again featuring Juanjo Mena and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, will be released November 18, 2016.

The disc includes two works in such completely different styles it's hard to believe they're by the same composer. The suite from Panambi, Ginastera's opus 1, is one of the most accomplished first publications by any composer, partly because Ginastera destroyed or declined to publish pretty much all of his early music. Written in the mid-1930s, it has the same combination of New World folklore, sounds and rhythms, and European modernist music (especially Stravinsky, Ravel and Debussy), that is so familiar with Villa-Lobos's music from the 1920s and 30s. It's an orchestral showpiece with a small but significant contribution from the choir, and this completely plays into the strengths of the musicians of the BBC Philharmonic and the Manchester Chamber Choir.

The second work could hardly be more different. The Second Piano Concerto was written in 1972, during Ginastera's "neo-expressionist" phase, the last 12 years of his life after he moved from Argentina to Geneva. Based on a 12-tone row that emerges from the seven notes of the bass solo ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!’ (Oh friends, not those sounds!) in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, this music is every bit as expressive as Panambi, though with different textures, and evoking different responses from the audience. The Concerto is a virtuoso showpiece for the pianist and, once again, for the orchestra, and pianist Xiayin Wang and the orchestral players come through with flying colours.

2016: let's keep the Ginastera Centennial rolling!

The perfect Ginastera centennial tribute

Alberto Ginastera's centennial year is coming along very well, I think.  I counted 36 concerts at InstantEncore in 2016, and nine CD releases so far on Amazon.com. The standard reputation model for a composer seems to be a slight drop in interest after death, and then a significant rise after the centennial. That's certainly what happened with Villa-Lobos, whose 1987 centennial was the cue for a huge increase in concerts, recordings, academic literature and overall popularity. Let's hope we see something like that with Ginastera, who has been very much under-rated for a long time now.

"I am no longer searching for a national style but a personal style," said Ginastera looking back on a career that is the perfect musical expression of Jorge Luis Borges' 1951 essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition". "Our patrimony is the universe;" says Borges, "we should essay all themes, and we cannot limit ourselves to purely Argentine subjects in order to be Argentine." Though Ginastera famously divided his music into three periods, Objective Nationalism, Subjective Nationalism and Neo-Expressionism, the general move from simple folkloric works to a more international, avant garde style did not remove folklore from the equation. Indeed, the relatively late Guitar Sonata from 1976 is replete with Cuecha and Nambicuara melodies and what Ginastera himself (channeling his inner music reviewer, perhaps) called "the strong, bold rhythms of the music of the pampas.*" The Guitar Sonata is not at all a doctrinaire post-War twelve-tone work, but rather a work of syncretism. There's even a quote from Wagner's Meistersinger in the witty Scherzo. Writing a Sonata in 1976 was an act of independence; to include such a fun Scherzo even more so. One of the things I love about Jason Vieaux's performance, which is the best I've heard, is how he pulls out all the stops in this movement without any sense of losing control. Comedy is famously hard, and it's hardest of all to pull off in music. There's a lot of layers here: Vieaux carefully negotiates the complex technical logistics while putting across Ginastera's take-off of Wagner's not-as-subtle put-down of Sixtus Beckmesser. Vieaux makes the whole Sonata sound completely organic, and this fine performance only emphasizes the importance of this piece in the Classical Guitar literature.

It's a stylistic step back to the early (1937) Danzas Argentinas, op. 2, played beautifully by pianist Orli Shaham. I've commented before that Ginastera and Villa-Lobos moved in opposite directions. Villa perhaps was Benjamin Button in this scenario.

The career of Villa-Lobos is a retrograde inversion of Ginastera's. Villa went from modernism to nationalism, Ginastera the reverse.

— Dean Frey (@villa_lobos) August 10, 2016

But in the late 1930s, the two were in sync with each other. Villa's Ciclo Brasileiro, written in 1936-37, shares the same pianistic textures, explores similar rhythms, also flirts with bi-tonality, and shares similar "Indianist" characteristics. While Ginastera has introduced modernist tropes into his music by 1947's Pampeana no. 1, op. 16, played here by Orli Shaham and her bother, the great violinist Gil, this music is not at all difficult on the ears. That's partly because of Ginastera's tendency to call back to 19th century virtuosi, especially Paganini, in much the same way Villa-Lobos quotes Puccini or Rimsky-Korsakov in the middle of otherwise very progressive music. It's also, as the excellent liner essay by Oberlin Conservatory Professor James O'Leary demonstrates, because Ginastera learned from his teacher Aaron Copland to temper modernism with the simple, open, honest music of "the common man". One of the most useful parts of O'Leary's commentary is the light it shines on the political aspects of these issues which seem at first purely musical. Ginastera's experience, like Copland's and Villa-Lobos's, had a political component every bit as fraught with difficulty, if not as dangerous in the end, as the experience of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Less so than the workmanlike Villa-Lobos Harp Concerto of 1953, Ginastera's 1956 Harp Concerto, op. 25, is an obvious star turn for the composer and for generations of grateful harpists. "He wrote our piece", says Yolanda Kondonassis in her introduction to the album.  It has a Bachian combination of erudite structure and joyful invention. Kondonassis, who has performed the work nearly 200 times, has mastered this music, and it shows in this completely secure but playful performance. She has superb support from the excellent Oberlin Orchestra under Raphael Jimenez.

This is really one of the most exciting recording projects I've come across this year. Everyone involved has connected to this marvellous music in a way that doesn't always get communicated to audiences quite like this. Kudos to the Oberlin Conservatory for providing both the academic foundation and sophisticated technical and marketing support for such an auspicious celebration.


* I recommend Charles King's excellent 1992 thesis "Alberto Ginastera's Sonata for Guitar Op. 47: an analysis", a very readable and useful study.

Music from Ginastera's Neo-Expressionist period

The Funkhaus Nalepastraße, or alten Funkhaus, is a former plywood factory that in 1951 was turned into the centre for broadcasting for East Germany. It's a natural place to record music from Alberto Ginastera's third "Neo-Expressionist" phase which began in 1958, influenced as it was by post-war European avant-garde music, with its use of atonality and serial techniques.

The new album from Capriccio, with Arturo Tamayo conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, includes four works from the 1960s and 70s, and includes more advanced music of Ginastera's than you're likely to hear anywhere else, even in his Centennial year. It's true that 2016 brought some welcome new discs, but orchestral music on disc and in concert in 2016 focusses, as one would expect, on the his Nationalist works written before 1958. This is for the most part uncompromising music, but beautifully crafted and played with precision and passion by this fine orchestra. 

It's interesting to compare the arc of Ginastera's career with that of Villa-Lobos. Villa's modernist phase came relatively early, following his exposure to the music of Stravinsky and Debussy. His most avant-garde works, especially the Choros series of the 1920s, were followed in the 30s and 40s by a more popular Nationalist phase, which resulted in the Bachianas Brasileiras. Ginastera, on the contrary, moved nearly entirely from folkloric inspiration towards abstraction and systematic explorations in the post-war international style.

That's the theory, in any case. Occasionally the rhythms of Argentina come through in this late music, as in, for example, the finale of the very fine Concerto for Strings, written for Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1965.  Going a bit against the grain, again, is the Glosses on Themes of Pablo Casals for String Orchestra and String Quintet, Op. 46, which was written, oddly enough, for the 1976 American Bicentennial. This is a moving celebration of Casals and his Catalan homeland (which was shared with Ginastera's forebears), and there are folkloric connections galore here, along with quotations from Bach (how Villa-Lobosian!), though with plenty of more modern interpolations as well. The other works aren't always austere and doctrinaire, either. Iubilum, written as a Louisville commission in 1979, is brooding but not always that adventurous in terms of tonality or structure. I expect, though, that it's hard to write a 12-tone Fanfare. The new recording easily outclasses the original Louisville one, conducted by Akira Endo.

The most evolved music on the disc is in the Estudios sinfonicos from 1967, which seems to be a recording premiere. I've only seen one reference to any other recording: a limited edition tape made for the Recording Guarantee Project, American International Music Fund, of the Koussevitzky Music Foundation. This was a broadcast of the Boston Symphony under Julius Redel, from Symphony Hall on Apr. 12-13, 1968, the American premiere. Here is a portion of the score (from the Boosey & Hawkes site), which indicates the relative complexity of this music.  It will take me a few more listens before I know exactly what I think of this piece, but I suspect it may be a masterpiece. In any case, this is a valuable issue, and it will be a reference recording for this music, I expect, for a long time to come.

While we're talking about Ginastera's orchestral music, we have less than a month to listen to yesterday's Prom 24 from the Royal Albert Hall. Juanjo Mena conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Ollantay, from 1947. This is fabulous music, and a bit easier on the ears!

A useful collection of Ginastera orchestral music

From July 28, 2010:

It's interesting how many of the orchestral scores of the very greatest Latin American composers were written for the ballet. The Brazilian Villa-Lobos wrote more than a few, as did the Mexicans Carlos Chavez & Silvestre Revueltas, and most of these works are of very high quality. But perhaps the most impressive ballet scores come from the Argentine composer Alberta Ginastera. This disc includes a wide range of ballet scores, from the first, Panambi, op. 1, to his very last work, Popol Vuh, left unfinished at his death in 1982. As well, this fine new Naxos disc includes an extended suite from one of Ginastera's finest works, Estancia, a nostalgic evocation of the fast-disappearing gauchesco world; the Suite de Danzas Criollas, in a new orchestration by Shimon Cohen; and Ollantay, a post-war score based on an Incan poem.

As with the recently-released Naxos disc of Revueltas music, we have here a collection of fairly recent and older recordings from various orchestras, all conducted by the excellent conductor Gisele Ben-Dor. Naxos has packaged 1997-2006 recordings made in Wales, Israel, and Abbey Road, though there are unfortunate overlaps with other CDs. Still, at a bargain price this may not be a major disadvantage.

For me the most interesting work here is Popol Vuh: The Mayan Creation. The original commission for the work, from Eugene Ormandy & the Philadelphia Orchestra, goes back to 1957, though Ginastera didn't begin work on the piece until the early 1980s. It's interesting that Ginastera should have set Popul Vuh for his ballet, since this is the same text used by Edgard Varese in his avant-garde classic Ecuatorial (1933). While Ginastera's music isn't as cutting edge, these creation stories have called forth some of his most impressive orchestral sounds. That's saying a lot, since Ginastera is a master of the orchestral palette.

Once again we tip our hats to Gisele Ben-Dor, and hope that she's in the recording studio again soon, with more premiere performances of such great Latin-American music.

Folklore & European tradition in piano music from Argentina

From May 12, 2010:

The arts in Argentina, like in so many New World countries, come from a fine balance of indigenous folklore and European traditions. Jorge Luis Borges argues, in "The Argentine Writer and Tradition", that Argentine writers must be free to invent their own literature in the context of the entire range of world literature. Thus Borges writes in the gaucho tradition of Martín Fierro, but at the same time in the traditions of the Norse Eddas, Cervantes, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

For those who know Astor Piazzolla only as a composer in the "nuevo tango" tradition (and the "nuevo" is problematic, since few are really aware of the classic tango sound), this CD might be a revelation. Piazzolla's biography - check out the excellent article on Wikipedia - is full of things you wouldn't expect. Though he was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in 1921, he spent most of his childhood in New York City, where he made early musical connections with jazz and with J.S. Bach. By the mid-50s, Piazzolla was in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger. Certainly Piazzolla had strong links with classic tango traditions, but there is also a jazz element in his "nuevo tango", and a strong classical foundation in all of his music (besides Bach there are the same French and Stravinskian influences you hear in Villa-Lobos, with an additional mid-century avante-garde sound Villa never sampled). This excellent disc of piano music from Argentina played by Carmen Piazzini has a thesis that is similar to that of Borges. The best composers of Argentina work in a much broader context than the traditional dance tunes of gauchos and tangueros. The short pieces by Piazzolla included in this well-filled disc include some jazzy pieces with an improvised feel (Picasso), and tango-tinged Bachianas (Preludio para la Cruz del Sur). Both styles can move sideways into Debussy or Chopin, and then shift back to the more familiar Argentina tango/milonga sound.

Alberto Ginastera doesn't need any special pleading to place him amongst the greatest composers of the 20th Century (in the World, not just in South America). Like his peers Carlos Chavez and Heitor Villa-Lobos, Ginastera moves easily from folklore-inspired pieces to more classically-structured, abstract works, as you can hear in the two works on this disc. Both Milonga (1938) and the dance-sonata Danzas Argentinas (1940) are from his "Objective Nationalist" phase, and both include piano-writing at the highest level. The other composers - most of them new to me - are represented by short works that can each be called "characteristic pieces". The works of the master art-song writer Carlos Guastavino stand out, as does Alberto Williams' piece. But this music is all of high quality, and the entire disc provides a pleasing variety of very listenable music.

This is a re-packaging of a CD originally recorded in Germany in 1997. The sound is excellent, with a natural piano sound that suits the music.