JUNE 29 FROM SPAIN TO THE NEW  WORLd
sonidos latinos I
Sunday, 4:30pm
Venetian Theater
Tickets:  $40.00, $32.50, $25.00, $17.50  
Vivica Genaux, mezzo-soprano; Max Barros, piano;
Orchestra of St. Luke's; Michael Barrett, conductor

The passion, flair, and influence of Iberian concert music in the New World is brought forth in this program of overlooked 20th century masterpieces.  2007 winner of New York City Opera's Christopher Keene Award, mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux returns to Caramoor in the original 1915 version of Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo;  a work perfect for her distinctive voice.  Pianist Max Barros introduces the music of Brazilian composer Mozart Camargo Guarnieri, and Michael Barrett and the orchestra traverse Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas' striking homage to Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

Sonidos Latinos is made possible by generous support from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

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ABOUT THE MUSIC

Camargo Guarieri
Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra

(Mozart) Camargo Guarnieri was born in Tietê, São Paulo, Brazil, on February 1, 1907, and died there on January 13, 1993. He composed the Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra in 1961. The work is dedicated to his third wife, Vera Silvia Ferreira, whom he had  married the year before. The composer conducted the premiere with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra on August 2, 1961. The soloist was João Carlos Martins.  In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for flute, oboe, clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, triangle, tenor drum, harp, and strings.

Guarneri was born in Brazil, but his father, a music-loving barber, was from Sicily. The parents christened several of their ten children after composers (Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti), but when Mozart began to pursue a musical career, he feared that the name would sound pretentious, so he adopted his mother’s maiden name, Camargo, as a middle name and signed himself M. Camargo Guarnieri.

He began studying music early on and came to adulthood at a time in which musicians all over South America, certainly including Brazil, were eagerly pursuing a nationalist music that would capture the specific rhythms and melodies of their own culture. Later he studied in Paris with Charles Koechlin and got to know the famous teacher Nadia Boulanger. Returning to Brazil at the outbreak of World War II, he worked especially as a conductor (he became permanent conductor of the Saõ Paolo Symphony Orchestra). He visited the United States a number of times and enjoyed considerable success with his music in this country, as well.

Even in his “abstract” works, such as the many symphonies and concertos, he retained a keen sense of Brazilian character. His output included ten works for piano and orchestra, six of them full-scale piano concertos. Of these, the Concertino has been regarded as the most popular by the composer’s biographer Marion Verhaalen. Yet, like almost all his works, it has not been formally published (though a useful arrangement for two pianos by Francisco C.R. Silva, with a study of the work, is available on the internet; an unrestricted download is available at http://tinyurl.com/6rnmn3).
 
The Concertino is cast in three movements, each reflecting characteristic Brazilian elements. Guarnieri often makes use of traditional rhythms, melodic gestures, orchestral colors, and the like, but he almost never takes actually Brazilian melodies for his music. He was willing to borrow characteristic scales (the third movement employs what he called a “scale from the northeast [of Brazil],” which employs a raised fourth degree and a lowered seventh, generating a particular model sound.
 
The first movement, Festivo, is in a sonata form that flows from the first statements of the piano in a lightly syncopated melody played by the two hands in octaves over a rustling orchestral part. One of the Brazilian features that becomes most prominent during the course of the Concertino is the characteristic division of eight eighth-notes into groupings of 3+3+2.
 
A diminuendo and gradual slowing down at the end of the first movement serves as a link to the second movement, marked Tristonho (Sad). It is filled with pensive lyricism in a simple song form. A brilliant Vivo offers strong contrast to the main theme.
 
The closing Rondo (Allegro) begins with sparkling piano virtuosity over a simple bass line (the texture suggests a jazz combo at the outset), until the orchestra takes over and the piano introduces a calmer idea. But for his close, Guarnieri—an experienced pianist and composer of concertos, after all, works the opening material into a brilliant, grandioso finish.

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Silvestre Revueltas
Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca

Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas died far too soon. His life was not as short as those of Schubert or Mozart, but, like Mussorgsky, alcoholism cut him off at about forty, at a time when he was helping his compatriot Carlos Chávez create a modern Mexican music, one that reflected the folk and popular traditions of the country, yet drew upon new elements, particularly inspired by Stravinsky (who, of course, did much the same thing with Russian folk elements in his most influential works). While Chávez liked to evoke the essentially lost music of Mexico’s pre-Columbian past, Revueltas lived very much in the present and drew upon the music heard in the plazas of the country’s villages. The tunes in his works, though seldom if ever literal quotations, bear a popular imprint; they are enriched with bold, high-contrast instrumentation and dissonant harmonies or doublings (often in parallel sevenths). The piercing trumpet and parallel melodic thirds are part and parcel of this traditional Mexican popular music. Revueltas avoids smooth, carefully crafted transitions, too, as contrary to the style of the plaza; rather, a sudden pause and a lurch into a new beginning takes listener and player from one theme to another.

The world was horrified in 1936 when soldiers of Generalissimo Francisco Franco shot Spain’s most distinguished poet-dramatist, Federico García Lorca, a symbol of the Republic, at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca, the renowned author of the dramatic, tense, violent, and passionate plays Blood Wedding and The House of Bernardo Alba, was an important cultural figure throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Revueltas was moved to compose a work in his memory--not one that drew on his poetry or specifically evoked his work, but rather a piece that celebrates his own Mexican culture, just as Lorca had celebrated his Andalusian origins. The outer movements are fast and highly rhythmic. Baile (Dance) celebrates the Mexican trumpet and its dancing partner, the tuba, with tremendous drive. The second movement, though, is conceived as a tribute to Lorca. Duelo (Mourning), featuring again the trumpet, brings in other brass soloists in its middle section to evoke the style of the saeta (the word literally means “arrow,” but in Andalusian music it refers to a genre of devotional song going back to the Middle Ages and featuring passionate outbursts of reverence, grief, or joy from the participants). The finale, Son (Sound), suggests a love of sheer sonority, though the name also refers to certain regional dances that shift metrically between 6/8 and 3/4 time. It brings the Homenaje to a rousing close.

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Manuel de Falla
El amor brujo

Manuel de Falla was born in Cadiz, Spain, on November 23, 1876, and died in Alta Gracia, Argentina, on November 14, 1946. He composed El amor brujo for the gypsy singer and dancer Pastora Imperio, who took the leading role, both singing and dancing, in the premiere of the original version at the Teatro Lara in Madrid on April 15, 1915. The original scoring was for flute, oboe, horn, and trumpet, with string quartet and piano, with percussion added in the final number. The following year Falla expanded the orchestration to the more familiar orchestral form, but it is the original version that will be performed here.

It has become a commonplace to say that the best Spanish music was composed by French or Russian composers; examples adduced to demonstrate the truth of this proposition include Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, Bizet’s Carmen, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnole, Debussy’s Iberia, and Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole. However true the statement may have been in the nineteenth century, the rise of a group of talented native Spanish composers in the twentieth changed the situation entirely. Yet even these Spanish composers for the most part undertook their advanced studies in Paris, where they often established the groundwork for their future fame and became closely associated with leading French composers.

Manuel de Falla, the most important and original of the first generation of native Spanish nationalist composers (a group that also included the slightly older Granados and Albéniz), began his musical training in his native Cadiz, though he was at first undecided between careers in music or literature. By 1893 he had firmly decided to become a composer, particularly through the influence of a series of concerts by a local orchestra in Cadiz, playing in the Museo de Pinturas, where he heard the music of Edvard Grieg, whose Norwegian nationalism, based on native folk song and presented with imaginative harmonization, inspired Falla with “an intense desire to create one day something similar with Spanish music.” He continued studying with private teachers and analyzed scores that particularly attracted him.

He entered the Madrid Conservatory in 1898, where he was a stellar student and won prizes in all his courses. His earliest works captured the musical character of his native Andalusia in a Romantic style that was nearer French than German. When his family suffered financial reversals around 1900, Falla began composing zarzuelas, the popular form of Spanish musical theater, roughly equivalent to the Viennese or Parisian operetta, but these works enjoyed only a limited success. He aimed at further studies in Paris, but first he worked, from 1902, with Felipe Pedrell, a scholar and composer of Spanish music, who helped two generations of Spanish musicians (Albéniz, Granados, Falla, and Roberto Gerhard) find their way as Spanish nationalists in a manner that converted the characteristics of native music into materials that could be employed with the techniques of the broader European musical tradition.

By 1907, when Falla left for Paris, he had achieved great popularity with songs, piano pieces, and, above all, his opera La Vida breve, the first of his works to reveal his particular personality. The same work made his reputation in Paris, after he showed it to Paul Dukas, who supported its performance at the Opéra-Comique. This did not take place until 1913, and by that time Falla had met Debussy, Ravel, and Albéniz, and had enlarged and rescored the opera. He found himself completely at home in Paris, both for the warmth with which his music was received and for the stimulation of the many other composers working there.

The outbreak of World War I sent Falla back to Spain. And there he produced the first version of the work that became El amor brujo, usually translated as “Love, the Magician,” or, more freely, “Wedded by Witchcraft.” This was first conceived as a specialty piece for a gifted gypsy singer and dancer named Pastora Imperio at the suggestion of the writers María and Gregorio Martínez Serra.

Falla became acquainted with Pastora and her family of Andalusian gypsies. He absorbed the forms of the music that we call flamenco—song types known as seguiríyas, soleares, polo, and alegrías. The scenario for the ballet was developed by the Serras from a story told by Pastora’s mother, Rosario nicknamed “la Mejorana.” They created a work built up of a collection of gypsy songs and spoken narrative and dances, scored for a small ensemble (flute, oboe, horn, and trumpet, with string quartet and piano).

The first version, premiered in Madrid on April 15, 1915, was not successful, though the reason apparently had little to do with its musical quality. Falla’s years in France had raised doubts among critics as to the genuineness of his commitment to Spanish art, and this was reflected in the negative reviews. Yet the same year saw successful performances of La Vida breve and an early version of his ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, based on a popular Spanish literary work. The performances effectively answered the complaint that Falla’s music was “lacking in Spanish character.” When he presented a concert performance of El amor brujo, rescored for full orchestra with adjustments to the libretto, in 1916, the work attained an instant success. One number, in particular, the Ritual Dance of Fire, went around the world in a version for piano solo made by Falla at the request of his friend Artur Rubinstein.

The original version emphasized the Arab-Hispanic colors of much Spanish music that is tinged with the art of flamenco. (Even when he expanded the work, Falla strove to keep that sensibility, but here is its original form.)   The scenario of the gitanería (the original version) is quite different from the later ballet.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS