The programme on this CD focuses on twentieth-century Italian music for the guitar. Its wide-ranging panorama encompasses works which, while maintaining tonality and forms of the past, mainly exalt the evocative power and a kind of enchanting magic of the six-stringed instrument. It is therefore a mythological guitar, which, by its character, tends to develop its idiomatical values and its sounds as if the instrument should turn itself into a dramatis persona, animated by a series of characters and tales. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was an eloquent and extremely cultivated master of this kind of poetics. Spellbound by the fascination of the guitar in 1932, he was enrolled by Andrés Segovia in the army of composers who were his allies; for his Spanish friend (and for other guitarists) he wrote pages imbued with affections, encompassing the festive gaiety and the biting irony, the joking fun and the funereal elegy. In particular, this recording aims at highlighting the last period of the composer’s activity, in which he made use of the guitar with the purpose of looking into himself with a benevolently bitter gaze (resuming his experience as an exile, and looking from above thanks to his penetrating knowledge of humankind); or else in order to stimulate the taste for an expressive and coloured interpretation in his guitar students.
The collection of the 24 Caprichos de Goya was composed in 1961 in Beverly Hills, in the Californian villa where the maestro took refuge after fleeing Fascist Italy in 1939. In his autobiography [Una vita di musica (Florence: Cadmo, 2005)] he did not linger on the motives behind this piece, and simply gave some informative details:
Only much later (indeed, precisely in this last year 1961), accomplishing my longtime promise to Segovia, I composed the 24 Caprichos de Goya, which is probably my most ambitious work for the guitar. It is too long to be performed entirely in a concert (it would require an entire programme); however, in order to encourage its performance, I divided it into four groups. Indeed, it can be entirely recorded on two disks (Segovia, full of enthusiasm, is promptly studying it). This series of pieces offered very important stylistic problems; since Goya really was an artist full of fantasy (frequently macabre or bizarre), who anticipated later times and was indeed very modern. On the other hand, his art was rooted in tradition and in the habits of the eighteenth century (though he frequently saw them as if through a deforming lens); and, most importantly, he was a pure-blood Spaniard! I had to take these elements into account, without letting myself be drawn to exceedingly contemporary “whims” and to the taste for parody. Therefore, this series (independently of the references to the subjects of the single drawings) is mainly based on dance-rhythms; they may come either from Spanish folklore (fandango, villancico, habanera, tango, jota, El Vito, zorzico) or from abroad, provided that they were accepted by the Spanish court (which was rather Francophile: minuet, gavotte, bourrée, rigaudon etc.).
The Caprichos are a series of eighty prints realized by Goya with four different engraving techniques, i.e. etching, aquatint, burin and drypoint. The collection was put up for sale to the Madrid customers on the last Ash Wednesday of the eighteenth century. Since the first reading, it is clear that Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music represents a kind of identification between his own story and that of the great Spanish painter. Just as Goya had said regarding his Caprichos, the Florentine composer could have said about his own:
The artist was convinced that censorship of human errors and vicescan also be the object of painting [or of music], and has chosen as subjects for his work, from the multitude of extravagances and mistakes that are common in any civil society, the concerns and common lies, authorized by custom, ignorance or interest, those that he believes most apt to supply material for ridicule, and at the same time exercise the artist’s fantasy.
In particular, the first of the three Caprichos included in this programme, titled “Francisco Goya y Lucientes, pintor” is a kind of musical self-portrait which could be re-entitled as “Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, musician”, since it mirrors the composer’s two souls. Through the initial vocalise, he evokes his lineage’s ancestral Spanish roots, while with the fugato he introduces himself as a “doctor in music”.
“No hubo remedio” was commented and explained by Goya himself:
No hubo remedio. – Of course, she deserved it [the gallows], but if they think of mocking her, they are wasting time. It is impossible to make the unashamed blush.
In Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s vision, the Dies irae’s theme becomes the pivot of a series of macabre and grotesque variations, rather unusual in his oeuvre.
The etching titled “Sueño de la mentira y inconstancia” does not belong in the collection of Goya’s Caprichos; through its symbology, it lets the painter’s frustration and bitterness emerge. He had fallen prey to these feelings due to the deceiving behaviour of his lover, the Duchess of Alba. The fact that Castelnuovo-Tedesco decided to include this print among his own Caprichos signifies that he recognized a special affinity between Goya’s character and a voluble and deceitful figure he knew well. (It is out of the question, however, that this could be a female lover, whom the composer never had; probably, it was a male friend).
The Appunti were the last, unfinished composition by Castelnuovo-Tedesco. The maestro wrote them in 1968 upon a commission by guitarist Ruggero Chiesa, for pedagogical purposes; however, he maintained at the forefront the aspects regarding expression, singing, dynamics, and the instrument’s timbral resources.
This magnificent Studio da concerto was the only composition by Giorgio Federico Ghedini for the guitar. Written in 1959, it maintains an avowedly tonal structure, while drawing itself away from tonality’s gravitational pull. In its three sections (A, B, A1 – the latter being an ornamented reprise of A), it goes from the archaizing lyricism of the first part to a restless dancing pitter-patter, reminiscent of primeval rites, in the central part. Nunc is the second and last composition for solo guitar by Goffredo Petrassi. Its title and character might be mirrored by the beginning of Burnt Norton, the first of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
The perception of the present (“Nunc”) does not imply the capability of solving its enigma; that which is observed is perforce unredeemable, undecipherable, fluctuating beyond the boundaries of self-awareness. In order to catch its pulse, to record its secrete cipher within another enigma – that of sound – Petrassi decided to entrust himself to the guitar, as he declared in an interview he gave to Ruggero Chiesa in 1973:
I deem it to be a mysterious instrument, whence a mystery is issued which can be communicated to very few people.
The negation of a time flowing like a ribbon, horizontally; the mixture of fragments of memories (such as a motif by Verdi, from Otello, which Petrassi would also cite in Ala for flute; and another vaguer motif from Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht) and of seemingly unrelated elements; the overcoming of “rational” connections of cause and effect, antecedent and following, a kind of discontinuity without any dramatic chasms: this all forms the psychological substratum and the musical essence of this piece, whose medium-like fascination cannot be either analyzed or described. As Eugenio Montale said about a famous poem he had written, “I had been its medium rather than its author”.
Bruno Bettinelli was the paradigmatic figure of somebody whose authoritativeness was unanimously recognized by the entire Italian musical world, but who, at the same time, was mild-mannered and solitary. He was one of the greatest teachers of composition in the twentieth century. His music distinguishes itself for the very high degree of its artisanal mastery and for its expressivity; while leaving room for the dialectics of contrasts, it does never push itself to the zones inflamed by drama, but rather observes the aural phenomena in the light of a serenely detached intellect. He approached the guitar in 1970, and wrote for this instrument both solo and chamber music works of faultless beauty. The Cinque Preludi (1971) are his second work for the guitar. Perhaps the correspondence of their title with that of a very popular collection by Heitor Villa-Lobos (Cinq Préludes) is not coincidental. However, Bettinelli’s style (different from that of the Brazilian master) eschews all attempts to magnify and dramatize the guitar’s sound. Instead, he turns it like a probe inside the realm of meditation; even in the most animated stages, he uses it allusively, always implying something which remains unsaid. As in the case of Petrassi’s guitar, also that by Bettinelli continuously brushes the threshold of mystery, without ever trespassing it.
Tenebrae factae sunt (1973) is one of the few guitar works written by Angelo Gilardino during the period of his activism as a concert performer, before dedicating himself full-time to composition. The title refers to the noche obscura described by St John of the Cross, i.e. the bewilderment of the souls who, willing to escape worldliness, are not yet being reached by the light of revelation. This anguishing moment finds a series of representations in the first four movements of the suite (lyrical, dramatic, sensual, hallucinatory), giving rise to the bittersweet climate of the postlude, bringing a ray of hope. The compositional style is grounded on ancient modalism.
Liner notes by Angelo Gilardino