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The sun shines brightly in January as the music travels south of the border under the baton of Mexican-born maestro Enrique Arturo Diemecke. Called “the preeminent guitarist of our time,” Sharon Isbin plays a pinnacle of the guitar concerto repertoire that evokes the sensuality of the royal palace gardens of Aranjuez in Spain. Seductive tango melodies and a romantic symphony turn up the heat.

 

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

Pablo Ortiz: Suomalainen Tango
Pablo Ortiz was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1956. He composed Suomalainen Tango on a commission for the National Orchestra of Catalonia (Spain), which first performed it on January 18, 2008. The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, trumpet, two trombones, percussion, and strings. Duration is about 12 minutes.

When we think of tangos, we think first of Argentina. A tango with a title implying a Finnish connection (Suomi is the name for Finland in Finnish) would seem to be some kind of a joke. But this proves not to be the case.

Argentine composer Pablo Ortiz has collaborated for more than a dozen years with the Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen in performance and creation, and through him Ortiz learned of the links between Finns who moved to Argentina or who visited and took the tango back to Finland, where it developed its own character. Thus a “Finnish tango” is actually a genuine type of dance music.

Pablo Ortiz studied first in his native Buenos Aires, then, in the early 1980s, went to New York to study with fellow Argentine composer Mario Davidovsky at Columbia University. Davidovsky’s style tends toward the serial approach, which he would inculcate in his students. He also was one of the rare composers to win the Pulitzer Prize. In the early 1990s, Ortiz taught composition at the University of Pittsburgh and co-directed the Electronic Music Studio there. Since 1994 he has taught at the University of California at Davis, where he is associate professor of composition.

Like many composers of his generation, he has not retained the strict serialism of the mid-century composers. Instead he draws musical ideas from a wide range of sources, then shapes them into compositions with great attention to detail.

Suomalainen Tango owes its character to a specific commission: The National Orcehstra of Catalonia wanted to have new piece from Ortiz to include on a program that would also feature a tango work by Astor Piazzolla and would close with Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony. Composers do not often know what pieces will share program space with them in a premiere, but in this case it struck Ortiz as particularly suitable to write a score that might mediate between the Argentine tango composition and the Finnish symphony—therefore, a Finnish tango! (Moreover, he included trombones in his orchestra in order to quote a prominent trombone theme in the Sibelius symphony, to make the reference explicit.)

Ortiz has noted that Finnish films (such as those directed by Aki Kaurismaki) use tangos for the soundtrack just as often as Argentine films do. “Argentina and Finland are one and the same,” he notes, “except for the fact that the Finns are slightly more laconic. But the passion is there in both countries and settings.”

 

Joaquin Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra
Joaquin Rodrigo was born in Sagunto, Valencia, Spain, on November 22, 1901, and died in Madrid on July 6, 1999. He composed the Concierto de Aranjuez in 1939. In addition to the solo guitar, the score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes (second doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, and strings. Duration is about 21 minutes.

The Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo, though blind from the age of three, began early music lessons in his native Valencia. By the time he was twenty-three, the local orchestra had played a work of his. In 1927 he entered the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where he was a pupil of Dukas; here he encountered Manuel de Falla, the leading Spanish composer of the day, who offered him encouragement. In the mid‑1930s he also studied musicology at the Sorbonne. He lived in Paris and in Germany during the Spanish Civil War, returning to his homeland only in 1939. The following year the premiere of his most popular work, the Concierto de Aranjuez, led Rodrigo to be hailed as a significant new light in Spanish music.

After that, Rodrigo’s style remained essentially the same. His music was shaped by his French teacher Dukas and by the Spanish nationalist composers. His works are filled with Spanish ambience and attractive tunes.

The Concierto de Aranjuez has become the single most popular concerto composed in the 20th century. During this period the classical guitar won new adherents because of the decades of superb musicianship of Andrés Segovia, both in his own right and as a teacher and inspiration for at least two generations of players.

 

Actually the Concierto de Aranjuez was composed for another Spanish guitarist, Regino Sainz de la Maza, in 1939. But for most audiences of the current generation, the modern history of the guitar as a concert instrument begins with Segovia (and Rodrigo did write a concerto for him—the Fantasia para un gentilhombre—in 1954.

The title Concierto de Aranjuez refers to a locale, twenty-nine miles south of Madrid, where, over the centuries, the Spanish kings built and elaborated several royal residences, the last of which included a building inspired by the Trianons at Versailles. Here, in 1808, Charles IV was forced to abdicate, in favor of his son Fernando VII. He later repudiated his abdication, appealing to Napoleon for help—and this led ultimately to the horrors of the war of 1808-1814, depicted to terrifying effect by Goya in paintings and drawings. Rodrigo evokes earlier happier images of Aranjuez as a peak of Spanish history and culture.

The concerto has no explicit program, but it is filled with musical gestures that recall the Golden Age of Spain, starting immediately with the strummed guitar chords in alternating 6/8 and 3/4 time, probably the single most fundamental “Spanish” musical gesture in music. After this figure vamps for a time through the orchestra, the violins enter with the principal theme of equally Spanish character

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The slow movement, the longest part of the concerto, recalls the saeta, a song performed by the women of Seville from their balconies during an annual religious procession through the streets. Their gently sustained, nasal, high-pitched style is imitated in the concerto by the English horn. The guitar takes up this melody and decorates it sensitively and lavishly. Eventually the guitar begins an extended cadenza, to which the orchestra responds loudly, though the solo then calms the ensemble and leads to the tranquil close.

The poignancy of this melody comes from personal tragedy. Rodrigo composed it during sleepless nights spent in anguish after the stillborn birth of his first child and his wife’s dangerous illness. He was recalling their honeymoon in the gardens of Aranjuez, and filled the music with all the expression of love and of loss.
The last movement is a lively dance alternating 2/4 and 3/4 time, and concentrating on showing off the soloist with the greatest possible virtuosity and brilliance.

Astor Piazzolla: Tangazo for Orchestra, Variations on Buenos Aries
Astor Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on March 11, 1921, and died in Buenos Aires on July 5, 1992. He composed Tangazo in 1969, creating it originally for orchestra (most of his earlier works were conceived for quintet or other small ensembles.) Duration is about 15 minutes.

In the United States the tango was a popular dance genre first introduced from Latin America by Vernon and Irene Castle in 1914 and then used for such popular songs as Sigmund Romberg’s “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” (The New Moon, 1928). Just as American jazz developed in the yeasty mix of cultures in New Orleans, Argentine tango blends elements of European—Spanish, Jewish, German, and Italian—and New World elements. In Latin America, the tango was and has remained a popular form of music-making, often approaching the level of light classics.

Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla came to America with his family when he was just three. He became a child prodigy on the bandoneon, the traditional tango instrument. Returning to Buenos Aires at sixteen, he studied composition with Ginastera while making tango arrangements for a bandleader. In 1946 he formed his own orchestra. In 1954 he composed a symphony for the Buenos Aires Symphony Orchestra; this led to a scholarship to study with one of the great teachers of the century, Nadia Boulanger, in Paris. She encouraged him to pursue the tango in which, she said, he found his true voice.

Piazzolla extended the concept of tango to a degree not recognized by many purists, who wished to stick with the old-fashioned tradition. Like Chopin, Johann Strauss the younger, and Scott Joplin in their own specialties, Piazzolla could reveal unsuspected riches in a “simple” dance form. By the time of his death, he had composed over 750 works, ranging from songs and dances to film scores to orchestral compositions that transmute the tango into the realm of classical music.

Tangazo (“Old-Fashioned Tango”) from 1969 is a tone-poem evoking the world of the traditional tango, beginning slowly in a musical darkness out of which a more lively rhythm leads to the multi-colored brightness of a brilliant fast-paced tango. The dance goes through various stages of color and energy, then drops back into the darkness out of which it came.

Carlos Chávez: Symphony No. 4, Sinfonía romántica
Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez was born in Mexico City on June 13, 1899, and died there on August 2, 1978. He composed his Symphony No. 4 in 1954 on a commission from the Louisville Orchestra, which gave the first performance under the direction of Robert Whitney. The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, chimes, xylophone, cymbals, claves, maracas, bass drum, snare drum, tenor drum, and strings. Duration is about 23 minutes.

Chávez received his first piano lessons from his older brother, starting when he was about nine. When he was eleven, he studied with Manuel Ponce, the leading Mexican composer of the day and began composing very actively. On his own he absorbed a leading treatise on orchestration by the French composer Albert Guiraud. Through this work he was able to study the scores of the principal composers of the day and to become largely self-taught as a composer himself.

In 1922, with his new wife, the pianist Otilia Ortiz, he toured Europe and began to make a name for himself. In Paris he befriended Paul Dukas, who urged him to draw upon his Mexican heritage.

At first Chávez’s music was only tepidly received in his native country, so he went to New York and became a close friend of Aaron Copland and Edgard Varèse, who helped bring his compositions to performance in venues where they were favorably received. (The friendship with Copland was one of the reasons for the American composer’s visit to Mexico City in the early 1930s, where he was inspired to write one of his first “populist” works, El Salón México.)

In 1928, Chávez accepted the directorship of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, a position he retained for 21 years. He also became director of his alma mater, the National Conservatory, where he inspired a whole new generation of Mexican composers, including Revueltas, Galindo, and Moncayo. Meanwhile he turned out a large number of substantial pieces through the 1930s, including perhaps his best-known work, the Sinfonía india (1935), evoking the ancient world of the Aztecs.

In the early 1950s, he retired from his formal associations in Mexico to devote himself more fully to composition, as well as teaching and guest conducting. Disillusioned with musical life in Mexico at this time, he spent most of his last years in New York, though—poetically, perhaps, he died at home while on a visit to his daughter.

The Symphony No. 4 was part of the enterprising series of new works commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra, whose young conductor, Robert Whitney, had put the ensemble on the musical map through the policy of commissioning new works for almost every concert.

For his Louisville commission, Chávez chose to write in a more consciously romantic style. But he continues to show his particular interest in writing for solo woodwinds, which are featured in long opening phrases of the Allegro. This is still a romantic score, but one definitely tinged with 20th-century moods and occasionally acerbic harmonies. The first movement is dominated by the woodwinds, gradually building from an energetic, contrapuntal opening to a dynamic climax. The slow movement (Molto lento) is where the strings come into their own, with poignant wide-leaping lines overlapping one another, suggesting dark tensions, reaching higher and higher in aching arcs, vaguely Mahleresque in feeling. The finale (Vivo non troppo mosso) chugs along with a chattering background figure and various other themes playing against it. If in the earlier years Chávez evoked the world of ancient Mexico, here he sounds fully modern and urban.

© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)

 

 

 

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