| A PASSION FOR THE TANGO | ||||||||||
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Suite from the Ballet Estancia, Op. 8a Throughout most of his career, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera attempted to find a synthesis between the indigenous music of his native country and the techniques of the twentieth century. His works, especially his ballets, often feature the fantastic, mysterious and magical stories and symbolism of the native Indian and pre-Columbian cultures. In 1958 he embraced serialism, blending it successfully with the native rhythms. In September 1971 the Opera Society of Washington staged Ginastera’s opera Beatrix Cenci as the inaugural production of the opera house of the new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Ginastera was a world traveler. While he spent many years teaching in his native country, the unsettled political situation, especially the rise to power of Juan Perón, interfered with his academic duties, requiring him to spend many years abroad, mostly in the USA and Europe. In 1971 he settled permanently in Geneva but continued to travel extensively. Ginastera’s earliest works date from the early 1930s, but he destroyed most of them. His Opus 1 is the ballet Panambi, whose orchestral suite, premiered in 1937, established his national reputation. Following the staging of the full ballet in 1940, he received a commission from Lincoln Kierstein to write a ballet with an Argentine setting for the American Ballet Caravan with choreography by George Balanchine (The company, whose goal was to remove ballet from the French/Russian tradition, had premiered Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kidd.) The result was the ballet Estancia (The Ranch), but unfortunately Kierstein’s troupe disbanded before it could be staged. The four-movement suite from the ballet was first performed in 1943 and became Ginastera’s most popular work. The complete ballet was finally staged in 1952 at Argentina's Teatro Colón, with choreography by Michel Borowski and sets by Dante Ortolani. The ballet describes a single day on a large ranch and tells of a city boy’s romance with a ranch girl, the exuberance of the gauchos and the beauty of the landscape. Each movement has its own characteristic rhythm and the music suggests a blend of Stravinsky and de Falla. The four movements of the Suite extracted from the ballet are: “Los trabadores agricolas” (The Land Workers): This movement features a vigorous rhythm – but virtually no melody – evoking South American dance rhythms.  Subtle changes in the basic rhythm create variety and tension. “Danza del trigo” (Dance of the Wheat): A serene dance evoking the peacefulness of the surrounding landscape fading into the horizon. Here the traditional Hispanic melody provides a sharp contrast to the emphasis on beat in the preceding movement. “Los peones de hacienda” (The cattlemen): A wild heavy-footed stomp. Musically speaking, these Argentine ranchers are not far removed from Stravinsky's primeval Russians tribesmen. The catch is that Ginastera has drawn from authentic ethnic rhythms, while Stravinsky created his musical image from his own imagination in The Rite of Spring. “Danza final (Malambo)” (The final dance): Malambo is a machismo dance with energetic steps, The final proof of manhood; it continues until only one man remains standing. Accordingly the dance, which starts quietly with only a few instruments, becoming wilder and faster until the crashing climax. It contrasts the monotonous drive of the other movements with a changing array of rhythms unified by a constant beat. & & | ||||||||||
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Cuatro estaciones porteñas (Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) Everyone knows that it takes two to tango, but no one can agree on where the dance originated: African-Argentinean slave percussion instruments? Andalusia? Gypsy? Cuba? Cataluña? For 150 years the characteristic Latin rhythm has been shaped and adapted to nearly every Spanish-speaking national culture. The arrabal, the squalid immigrant slum of the late nineteenth century outside Buenos Aires, bred its own version of the tango. A popular song, laced with bitter urban protest, had by the 1930s developed into a pessimistic expression of a fatalistic, melodramatic outlook on love and life. It was into this world that the parents of Astor Piazzolla arrived from Italy. And it was the music of the arrabal that shaped Piazzolla’s entire career. During the Depression, Piazzolla’s family moved to New York, where he learned piano and the bandoneón, a type of concertina with 38 pitches that had become the predominant instrument in the tango ensembles of his native Argentina. After a stint in Paris, studying composition with no less an eminence that Nadia Boulanger, Piazzolla returned to Argentina to form his first Tango Octet and later his renowned Tango Quintet, featuring bandoneón, violin, piano, electric guitar and bass. His name became inseparably associated with the tango. Influenced by his studies in Paris and by classical forms, the style of Piazzolla’s compositions – which he called the “nuevo tango” (new tango) – was a cut above the traditional tangos. No longer dance music, they became concert music, although for the nightclub rather than the concert hall. While the standard tangos popular here in the 1920 to 50s have a certain sameness, Piazzolla’s tango-based compositions, by contrast, achieve infinite variety through his use of complex syncopation and abrupt tempo shifts. The psychological intensity and sophistication of his music so infuriated the traditionalists that he was repeatedly physically assaulted and even threatened with a gun to his head during a radio broadcast. Piazzolla not only took his influences from classical, folk and jazz music but in turn has also served as an inspiration to such jazz artists as Jerry Mulligan and Chick Corea. His tangos have been arranged, among others, for classical violinist Gidon Kramer and for the eclectic Kronos Quartet. Written as four distinct works between 1964-1970, Cuatro estaciones were not originally intended to be performed as a suite, although in later years Piazzolla put them together occasionally to perform with his quintet. They were originally scored for violin, electric guitar, piano, bass, and bandoneón but have been transcribed for many instruments and instrument combinations. Finally, in the late 1990's, Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov arranged for Gidon Kramer the classical chamber orchestra version for full string orchestra with solo violin. While Piazzolla occasionally quotes Vivaldi (in “Summer” and especially in “Winter”) Buenos Aires’s climate is mild without the drastic seasonal fluctuations of Venice. The four movements of Piazzolla’s suite describe more the vagaries of human emotions rather than those of the weather. Each of Piazzolla’s Seasons is a single movement work, although they all loosely follow an internal fast-slow-fast tempo pattern recalling the tempi of the Vivaldi’s three movement concerti. Likewise, Piazzolla’s work features a violin soloist, although there are some extensive solos for the other instruments as well. In the improvisatory spirit of Piazzolla’s original band, soloists sometimes add their own cadenzas. Listeners can also expect to hear some scrapes, squeaks, snaps and grunts that would have made poor Vivaldi blanche. "Verano porteño" (summer) sports a gutteral main theme with a double-stopped dissonant glissando, naturally, a tango. The first part of the theme is repeated in several subtle variations. A little riff from Vivaldi blends into a slower more lyrical middle section. Note, however, that underlying each theme is an ostinato tango rhythm accompaniment. "Otoño porteño" (autumn) is a tango with two internal cadenzas. It opens with an ostinato suggesting jazzed up cicadas that leads into the first of the movement's two themes. After a few varied iterations of the theme comes a real surprise, a long solo for cello lasting almost two full minutes of the seven-minute movement. The first part, a cadenza, is reminiscent of Bach's unaccompanied cello suites; the second part of the solo introduces the slow middle section of the movement. A return to a variant of the first theme leads into a new cadenza, this time for the violin, plus varied reprise of the slow cello theme. A coda of a snarling string-snapping and scratchy variation of the opening theme concludes the movement. "Invierno porteño" (winter) sports a sultry theme which the composer repeats in different tempi and moods. A second theme grows out of the main theme but is definitely subsidiary to it. A quote from Vivaldi's "Winter" surreptitiously inserts itself into the violin part later in the piece. There are two cadenzas, and the piece concludes with a coda in the style of Vivaldi, although it is not a direct quote. Piazzolla's final season, "Primavera porteña" (spring), once again has a Baroque flavor to it – although more in the style of Bach than Vivaldi. The solo violin begins with a theme, plus scratchy rhythmic additions, which is eventually joined by the solo cello in a contrapuntal duet before the movement takes off with the customary rhythmic full orchestra accompaniment. In line with the style of the entire set, a slow theme comprises the middle section of the movement. Note how Piazzolla patterns the pizzicato texture of the slow section to Vivaldi's style (here from "Winter") without actually quoting it. | ||||||||||
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El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) Like so many artists, Manuel de Falla showed not only precocious musical ability, but also facility as a writer and a fascination with the Spanish themes and folklore that were to characterize so much of his music. He spent his youth and early career as a pianist and teacher, the proceeds from which helped support his family. In 1905 Falla composed La vida breve, with which he won a contest for a Spanish opera held by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. With this opera he elevated traditional Andalusian cante jondo (deep song) to the level of high art. However, the planned performance at the Teatro Real fell through, and the opera, in a revised two-act form, was finally premiered in France in 1913 and again in Spain in 1914. De Falla realized early on that in order to achieve international exposure for his music, he would have to leave Spain. In 1907 he settled in Paris where he came under the influence of Paul Dukas, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. His music, however, even during the height of the French influence, remained solidly Spanish in style. With the outbreak of World War I he returned to his native country. A deeply religious – almost fanatic – Catholic, de Falla expressed his faith in a magnum opus, Atlántida, an epic based on what he regarded as the holy mission of his boyhood hero Christopher Columbus. The cantata, in which, rising from the ruins of Atlantis, the Spanish nation goes forth under the banner of Christ to the New World, remained incomplete at de Falla’s death. He actually submitted parts of it to Church authorities for approval. Although devout, de Falla was fundamentally apolitical. Initially leaning towards the new Second Spanish Republic in 1931, his intense faith kept him from a complete buy-in with the anti-religious philosophy of the leftists. However, he never answered the call of Franco’s repressive nationalism. In 1939, disillusioned with Spain, and with Europe on the brink of war, he moved to Argentina. Already in frail health and living on an ascetic diet, he died still trying to complete Atlántida. The ballet, El sombrero de tres picos, started life in 1917 as an accompaniment to a two-act pantomime adapted from a popular story by Pedro de Alarcón. Sergey Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes, heard the music on a visit to Spain and asked de Falla to expand it into a ballet. The story tells of a miller and his faithful wife, and an aging lothario of a Corregidor (district governor) and his haughty wife. In the story – which would have been a perfect one for a Rossini opera – the Corregidor tries to seduce the miller’s wife; the miller, in revenge, tries to seduce the Corregidor’s wife. It all ends happily, except for the Corregidor who is left looking foolish. The ballet premiered successfully in London in 1919 with set designs by Picasso. The ballet consists of seven numbers, including a short choral and a soprano solo part. Introduction- Afternoon: The introduction was added in London, to give the audience time to appreciate Picasso’s drop curtain. After an opening fanfare from trumpet and timpani, | ||||||||||
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Bolero “I have written only one masterpiece,” remarked Maurice Ravel to fellow composer Arthur Honegger, “.. That is Bolero. Unfortunately, it contains no music.” His self-irony notwithstanding, it is one of the most popular musical compositions of all time. It was created for the dancer Ida Rubinstein, a protégé of Diaghilev and pupil of Michel Fokine, who was the inspiration for numerous artists of the 1910s and ‘20s, including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, André Gide, Darius Milhaud and others. She asked Ravel in 1927 to orchestrate for her some of Isaac Albéniz’s dances from Iberia, but the composer found out that someone else was already working on those. Bolero was born out of this confusion. Its premiere on November 22, 1928, with Rubinstein as the solo female dancer and 20 male dancers mostly standing around ogling her, created a sensation. The whole piece consists of the insistent repetition of a single melody of slightly irregular phrasing, accompanied by an ostinato rhythm on the snare drum. Its magic is almost childishly simple: to repeat the melody, changing the instrumentation, gradually increasing the volume, and adding more instruments. But the true genius of the piece is in its “punch-line,” a sudden unexpected and drastic change of key, at which point the whole meticulous structure explodes. The Spanish Bolero is usually a couples dance of moderate tempo in triple meter, different from the Cuban dance by the same name, which is in duple meter. According to tradition it was invented by the dancer Sebastian Cerezo in 1780. In the nineteenth century it became popular with classical composers, including Beethoven, Chopin, Carl Maria von Weber and Hector Berlioz. It is said that the best Spanish music has been written by Frenchmen, and Maurice Ravel was a prime example. His first “Spanish” composition was the “Habañera” for two pianos in 1895, which was followed by many others, including Alborada del gracioso, the opera L’heure espagnole, Tzigane, Rapsodie espagnole and, in 1928 Bolero. | ||||||||||
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| Copyright © Elizabeth and Joseph Kahn 2008 | ||||||||||
