Ensemble intercontemporain / Susanna Mälkki LUCA FRANCESCONI Etymo - Da Capo - A fuoco - Animus

 

ETYMO - DA CAPO - A FUOCO - ANIMUS

 

Anja Lechner / Pablo Márquez SCHUBERT Die Nacht

German cellist Anja Lechner and Argentinean guitarist Pablo Márquez met in 2003 and have since explored the most diverse repertoire and modes of expression in their concerts. For their first duo album, a conceptual context is provided by the strong tradition of songs with guitar accompaniment prevalent in 19th century Vienna, as Lechner and Márquez play some of Schubert’s most beloved songs (including Die Nacht, Nacht und Träume and Der Leiermann), elegantly framing the album’s centrepiece: Schubert’s expansive ‘Arpeggione’ sonata. Many of Schubert’s songs were published in alternative versions with guitar during the composer’s lifetime; in some cases, the guitar version appeared even before the one for piano. Interspersed on the recording, as an echo and commentary to Schubert’s spirit and language, are the graceful Trois Nocturnes originally written for cello and guitar by Friedrich Burgmüller (1806-1874).

Nouvel Ensemble Moderne / Lorraine Vaillancourt ZAD MOULTAKA Où en est la nuit

The choice of knowing only the titles and dates of the compositions before listening to this recording stems as much from the pleasure of discovery as that of the challenge of my faculties for listening and emotion.

The great fun of this album’s pertinence appeared to me simultaneously in the construction of the works, the quality of the sound matter and spaces, the coherence of the organization of the pieces amongst themselves, which brings out their individual character whilst creating the dramaturgy of a musical piece in three movements.

Où en est la nuit can be heard as an overture in which the mufed sounds of a bass drum merging with the harmonics of the piano suggest a sort of percussion stimulating a ritual dance that refers to Hanbleceya, inspired, with distance, by Amerindian cultures. By its atmosphere and this beat with Fanàriki metallic sonorities, it also introduces the hypothesis of a second movement that is organized in a fluidity and aesthetic kinship with the Guitar Concerto.

The group of these three works, even though dating from different periods, creates a sound identity in which, paradoxically, the disturbing and the soothing are combined.

The acoustic homogeneity and constant musical quality of the whole triptych are the fruit of the remarkable interpretation of the NEM conducted by Lorraine Vaillancourt. These qualities exclude carelessness in the listening: they capture and lead the listener in an attentive musical roaming.

There is ‘a mystique’ in Zad Moultaka’s work that is not of a religious order but is inspired by Nature and numerous cultural traditions, in which the Human Being and his philosophical quest are at the centre of the societal fact. It is the kneading and metamorphosis of this group of elements that the composer elaborates in an innovative musical language, fertilizing the listener’s imagination.

The musical encounter between Lorraine Vaillancourt, the NEM and Zad Moultaka seems obvious. It is based on affinities and shared artistic and human standards. Such demands in the process of realization, all the more so in that ‘Hybris’ is necessary in the making of art. This complex alchemy, of which the substances are often antinomical, is affirmed delicately and discreetly in this performance.

This striving for perfection incorporated into attentive, amiable listening charmed me from my first encounter with Lorraine Vaillancourt. This was the beginning of an artistic companionship that has lasted more than twenty years. Even though more recent, my relationship with Zad Moultaka is of the same nature.

This relational aspect could seem off the point in this text. But, in the socio-culture of the arts, undermined and undermining, in which doubt, ego and narcissism abound, it is not simple to reconcile stakes, professional constraints and shared sentiments. Time passes ineluctably! This time, a factor of erosion and decantation that lets only the essential subsist, has deposited sediment on the experience of this reunion of artists as closely to the perfection of sound and gesture as possible.

By listening to the works it proposes, this musical edition creates a suspended time, a pleasant, fleeting removal from reality... (Raphaël de Vivo)

Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana / Dennis Russell Davies BRUNO MADERNA Now, and Then

Unlike many of his radical new music colleagues, Bruno Maderna (1920-1973) had a great affection for older music, especially that of the Italian Renaissance and Early Baroque eras. But his transcriptions had little to do with the orthodoxy of so-called ‘historically informed’ interpretation. In the belief that works of art can be removed from their original contexts, he used contemporary instrumental resources to discover new meaning and a new validity in the works of old masters. His transcriptions of Gabrieli, Frescobaldi, Legrenzi, Viadana and Wassenaer are vividly conveyed by the RSI Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies in a programme which includes Chemins V by Maderna’s good friend Luciano Berio (1925-2003). Chemins V is itself a transcription of sorts, a chamber orchestra version of Berio’s Sequenza XI. Soloist Pablo Márquez references flamenco and the guitar’s classical heritage, while the orchestra engages with the guitar on levels of expanded harmony. Dialogue develops, as Berio said, “through multiple forms of interaction, from the most unanimous to the most conflictual and estranged.” (ECM Records)

Anne Gastinel / Pablo Márquez IBÉRICA

This engaging new release leaves no doubt that the sometimes cheerful, sometimes melancholy song of the cello can pull off a Spanish accent just as well as that of the classical guitar. With “Ibérica”, French cellist Anne Gastinel and Argentinean guitarist Pablo Márquez (whose recording of the vihuela music of Luys de Narváez so impressed recently – ECM, 10/07) bring an urbane and sophisticated yet earthy and sensual quality to the songs and dances of Falla and Granados, as well as the solo guitar and solo cello music of the great Spanish cellist and friend of Andrés Segovia, Gaspar Cassadó. The opening Danza española No 1 from Falla’s La vida breve is a revelation, Gastinel’s spiccato-studded bowing showering fiery notes over Márquez’s crisply articulated accompaniment; the Intermezzo from Granados’s opera Goyescas and the same composer’s tonadilla La maja dolorosa meanwhile highlights the intense beauty of Gastinel’scantabile playing.

In another tonadilla, the well known La maja de Goya, Márquez displays the finely nuanced singing quality of his own playing; he is equally convincing in three works for solo guitar by Cassadó (here recorded for the first time), especially in the moving Canción de Leonardo, a homage to Segovia’s young son who was killed in an accident in 1951.

Gastinel also makes a solo contribution with Cassadó’s famous Suite for solo cello, fully availing herself of the expressive possibilities of this superb, multifaceted work. But this disc ultimately belongs to the chemistry that seems to exist between these two remarkable musicians. (William Yeoman / Gramophone)

Pablo Márquez GUSTAVO LEGUIZAMÓN El Cuchi Bien Temperado

Guitarist Pablo Márquez celebrates the work of a remarkable figure in Argentinean music: Gustavo “Cuchi” Leguizamón. Leguizamón (1917-2000) was a composer, pianist, guitarist, poet – and also a lawyer and teacher in the city of Salta where Márquez grew up. It was in his teaching capacity that Márquez first encountered him in person: “He was my history teacher at the Collegio Nacional when I was thirteen years old. When I saw Dr. Gustavo Leguizamón come into the classroom for the first time, I had no idea that I was in the presence of one of Argentina’s greatest musicians, the composer of famous zambas I’d known and sung since early childhood. Cuchi liked to say that ‘the ultimate accolade for an artist is that people think his work is anonymous.’”

As a composer, Leguizamón was an exceptional melodist and an adventurous traditionalist. The majority of his work consists of zambas, which Márquez considers Salta’s quintessential musical form.

Leguizamón brought a sense of harmonic freedom to these dance pieces, incorporating his melodic and harmonic ideas in Argentine traditional music, “without ever losing its essence or strong sense of rootedness.” A builder of bridges between art music and oral traditions, he was inspired by classical music and by 20th century composers including Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Schoenberg; his “Zamba del carnival”, comprised of twelve notes, references Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic series.
For his guitar arrangements of Cuchi, Pablo Marquez alludes to the formal design of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and its rigorous exploration of all the key signatures. “To provide a wealth of colours I set myself the challenge of never repeating any key. In view of the small number of keys commonly used in solo guitar music it was my way of enriching folk practice.”
The ‘bridge-building’ which Leguizamón proposed is extended in Márquez’s work, although the bridge is perhaps approached from a different direction. Leguizamón was a traditionalist and a popular artist who examined new music “with an autodidact’s passion”. Márquez on the other hand reflects upon his classical background in this encounter with traditional music. “Although I approach it as a ‘visitor’, this music is nevertheless in my blood.” (ECM Records)

Susanna Mälkki / Ensemble Intercontemporain LUCA FRANCESCONI Etymo - Da Capo - A fuoco - Animus

Luca Francesconi, born in 1956, has emerged as one of the leading Italian composers of the generation after Berio and Nono. A pupil of Berio and Stockhausen, Francesconi is less well known in the UK than, for instance, Salvatore Sciarrino, who is nine years older, but as this collection of ensemble pieces shows, he has a genuinely distinctive musical personality, and the knack of creating sonorities of real immediacy and dramatic power. With the exception of Da Capo, for nine instruments, from 1986, the pieces here date from the mid-1990s. The biggest, most ambitious and most memorable of those is Etymo, which takes a collection of fragments from Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, sets and atomises them for a soprano soloist and enmeshes the voice in teeming, febrile textures spun from an instrumental ensemble with real-time digital processing. Animus is an electronics-based piece too, with a solo trombone caught in a sound web of its reflections, while A Fuoco pits a solo guitar against an ensemble in a study of musical memory. The sounds are haunting, seductive, intensely vivid; it's a shame that the accompanying notes don't match the clarity of the music. (The Guardian)

Pablo Márquez LUYS DE NARVÁEZ Musica del Delphin

Recording the “Seis libros del Delphín” has been a long-held wish of the Argentine guitarist Pablo Márquez, who came to Europe almost twenty years ago to study renaissance repertoire and to delve into contemporary treatises on performance practice. “Troughout my artistic development, Luys de Narváez has remained a passion of mine, never failing to move me with the mystical nature of his music and the crystal clarity of his discourse”, he writes in his performer’s note to the present album which marks his debut on ECM New Series.

Today Márquez is one of the most accomplished and versatile virtuosi of his instrument, an outstanding interpreter of contemporary music who collaborates regularly with groups such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and is equally at home in the Argentine traditional music he has studied in depth with his mentor and fellow countryman Dino Saluzzi. It was through Dino that ECM producer Manfred Eicher met Márquez and offered him the opportunity to present his selection of 17 out of the more than forty pieces included in the “Seys libros”.

Like many historically informed performers today, Márquez has long learned that “authentic” instruments don’t provide a guarantee for insightful and adequate interpretations. Just the contrary: “My main goal with this album is to show that you can play this renaissance music convincingly even if you don’t use the original vihuela. There is a considerable performance history, especially with some of the more popular pieces out of this compendium such as the ‘Mille Regretz’, but most often the tempi have been much too slow, so that the ornamentation tended to become too heavy and demonstrative and couldn’t be discerned from the pure vocal line any more. That’s why it is so important to understand the grammar of these compositions, a grammar which reveals many parallels with contemporary vocal polyphony.”

Luys de Narváez lived in the age of Josquin and Nicolas Gombert, whose music he arranged for the vihuela. Born in Granada in about 1500, he served the Commander de León (the dedicatee of the “Seys Libros”) as a musician before transferring to the service of the future king Philip II with whom he travelled extensively between Flanders and Italy. As an outstanding improviser on the vihuela – a predecessor of the modern guitar – he was famed for his extemporization of complicated polyphonic structures in a style often reminiscent of Josquin Desprez. In his "Seys Libros", his most important work which was first published in Valladolid in 1538 and subsequently widely reprinted in Europe, Narváez assembles fantasias, pieces based on vocal settings by contemporary composers, music for voice and vihuela and, historically most important, two groups of “Diferencias” which are the first printed sets of variations in European music.

Although Pablo Márquez’ carefully composed programme covers less than half of the pieces contained in the “Seys Libros”, his selection offers a representative overview of the compendium as a whole. “It was most important to me to include all the highly-accomplished fantasias in the eight different modes from the first book. They have never been a central component of the guitarist’s repertoire, that’s why I wanted to show how rewarding they can be if you find the right style even on the modern instrument. The main challenge for the modern interpreter with this music is creating the natural flow and a clear design of the polyphony, allowing the listener to follow all the parts. Obviously, another important aspect is the ornamentation. You have to add things, as any graphic symbol meant extra work and extra expenses when these extremely costly tablatures were prepared. There is an aspect of freedom and improvisation even in this carefully notated music.”