Spanish Impressions Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Joaquín Turina

(1882–1949)

Piano Trio No. 2 in B minor, Op. 76

Lento – Allegro molto moderato

Molto vivace

Lento

As in so many other European countries in the nineteenth century, it was nationalism, rooted in folk culture, that brought about the revival of classical composition in Spain. Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and above all Manuel de Falla were the founding fathers, and amongst the generation that followed them, Joaquín Turina – composer, pianist, conductor and influential teacher – is the name that stands out. Like Falla, Albéniz and Granados, Turina found his classical models not in Austria-Germany, where the ideal was symphonic (i.e. goal-directed, continually developing) music, but in France, where a new kind of thinking was emerging, capable of treating harmonies, textures, rhythms as things in themselves, revelations of some kind of mysterious, time-transcending meaning – an attitude comparable, but not entirely congruent with Impressionism in painting.

It helped that the two leading musical progressives at that time, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, were both fascinated with Spanish folk music and culture, especially those of Turina’s native Andalusia, and saturated themselves in its sound and atmospheres – largely imagined in Debussy’s case, as he only ever spent a couple of hours in the country, yet potent nevertheless. There was also the less sensationally novel but still highly original figure of Gabriel Fauré, who achieved such marvelous things in the field of chamber music. The influence of all three can be heard in Turina’s Second Piano Trio, composed in 1933. The three-movement form found in so many of the piano trios of Haydn and Mozart is echoed here. (Haydn and Mozart were acceptable models for Debussy and Ravel; it was with Beethoven that they felt German music had gone horribly wrong!) And, for listeners who know the trios and quartets of Ravel and Fauré and the string quartet of Debussy, there will be moments where Turina’s debt to those lucid, impassioned yet also strangely calm masterpieces can be felt. But the thoroughly digested Spanish folk elements provide a counterbalance. This isn’t picture-postcard music: Turina doesn’t simply imitate traditional styles, but the tangy flavor of Spain can be sensed in the first movement’s contrasting theme, in the exciting dance-patterns of the five-in-a-bar middle movement, and especially in the rondo-like finale, where themes from the two earlier movements are drawn into the circling formal dance.

Enrique Fernández Arbós

(1863–1939)

Three Spanish Dances, Op. 1

Bolero (Tempo di bolero)

Habanera (Allegretto moderato)

Seguidillas gitanas (Allegro ma non troppo)

Enrique Fernández Arbós was more celebrated in his own time as a virtuoso violinist and an authoritative conductor (not only in Spanish music) than he was as a composer, and he is probably best remembered today for his atmospheric orchestrations of some of Albéniz’s piano works. The full title of these three dance movements for piano trio is Three Original Pieces in Spanish Style: although Arbós liked to call the work his ‘Spanish Trio’, he was keen to emphasize that the music was all his own work – no pre-existing folk material was used. A good comparison might be with Dvořák’s Dumky Trio, which evokes the rhythms, melodic inflections and emotional character of the Slavic ‘Dumka’ dance form but with just enough respect for the manners of the classical concert hall, and particularly the haut bourgeois salon, where music for the highly practical combination of violin, cello and piano flourished. The distinctive footwork and gestures of the imperious Bolero and the slower, sultry Habanera can easily be imagined in the first two movements. Then the finale, Seguidillas gitanas (Gypsy songs, usually in three-time), more abandoned and less good-mannered than the previous two movements, celebrates that near-universal European archetype of dangerous, enthralling sexual liberty, the Gypsy dancer.

Mariano Perelló

(1886–1960)

Tres impresiones

Pensando en Albéniz

Capricho andaluz

Escenas gitanas

The violinist Mariano Perelló was one of the founder members of the Trio Barcelona, an important influence in the cultural life of the Catalan capital during the 1910s and 20s, but also known across Europe and in the Southern Americas. It was natural that Perelló would turn to the medium he knew best for these celebrations of Spanish national music – ‘Spanish’, one should stress, not specifically Catalan. Perelló’s love of his native region, which in recent times has tried to assert its own independence, doesn’t seem to have inclined him to chauvinism. The Tres impresiones (Three Impressions) were dedicated to his two fellow players in the Trio Barcelona, Ricard Vives (piano) and Joaquim Pere Marés (cello) and, partly in tribute to them, partly in homage to the classical dialogue style perfected by Haydn and Mozart in their chamber works, Perelló is not only careful to make sure each instrument gets its turn in the spotlight, but makes exchange between the instruments a vital part of the music. Imagine the civilized, witty conversational ideal of late eighteenth-century Paris or London recreated in a distinctly Spanish environment, in which vibrant, unpolished folk song and dance surrender themselves to a process of middle-class refinement – but only up to a point.

Gaspar Cassadó

(1897–1966)

Piano Trio in C major

Allegro risoluto

Tempo moderato e pesante

Recitativo. Moderato ed appassionato

Outside his native Spain, Gaspar Cassadó was best known as an outstanding cellist, particularly in the field of chamber music, where his partners included the violinists Yehudi Menudin and Bronisław Huberman, and the pianists Louis Kentner, Arthur Rubinstein and Alicia de Larrocha, with the latter of whom he toured extensively in the later 1950s. But as this Piano Trio (1926) shows, he was also a fine composer: confident, stylish, darkly impassioned and – perhaps even more distinctively than his older compatriot Turina – able to ingest elements from his native folk music and use them for his own intensely expressive purposes. Like Turina, Cassadó learned a lot from the leading French composers (he studied with Ravel as well as Falla), but unlike Turina he doesn’t attempt to adapt his ideas to inherited classical forms here, preferring instead to follow his own lively fantasy. The half-voluptuous, half-sardonic nocturnal atmosphere of Debussy’s Cello Sonata casts a long shadow, but Cassadó has very much recreated his impressions on his own terms: Debussy’s subtle guitar impersonations, for instance, become something much more vibrant and confrontational here, full of the energy and flair of the notorious and alluring fandango.

SPANISH IMPRESSIONS

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