The relationship between “cultivated” and “folk” music has never been easy to describe. It has sometimes taken the shape of a supercilious disdain for “folk” music, whose inflections, performance styles or idiomatic traits could be condemned as rough, unsophisticated or “wrong” by the self-appointed censors from the world of academic refinement. Sometimes, the relationship has become that of a curious or sometimes scholarly study of the popular tunes, harmonies, rhythms, scales etc., in an interest which ultimately gave birth to an entire discipline, that of ethnomusicology. Nearly always, however, elements from one’s own musical tradition, or from that of a distant country, have found their way into the repertoire of “classical” music. Sometimes this has taken the form of exoticism, whereby a distant culture is evoked (frequently in a simplistic and distorted fashion) by means of its music, or of what is perceived to be “its” music. By way of contrast, the use of the popular musical heritage of a composer’s own country takes different shapes depending on the context of creation and destination. In other words, results may be dramatically different when a composer uses popular elements within works written and conceived primarily for his fellow countrymen, or within pieces written in one’s own country but destined for performance abroad, or within pieces conceived and performed in exile.
Finally, a further important element to consider is “how far” is the “popular” musical language from that of the “cultivated” musical elite of the time. To put it simplistically, the “cultivated” and the “popular” were much closer to each other in Mozart’s Vienna than, for example, in the presence of genuine Spanish elements at the time of the French Impressionism. On the other hand, the interest of French musicians for new scales (including modality) and chordal combinations opened the way for the renewed appeal of alternative ways of organising the musical sounds both horizontally and vertically.
This explains – at least partly – the creation of numerous Spain-inspired works by Debussy (including one by the title of Ibéria) and by Ravel (whose best-known piece is doubtlessly Boléro). It is not by chance, therefore, that Debussy himself praised enthusiastically another Iberia, the one written by Isaac Albeniz.
In its entirety, Iberia consists of twelve pieces grouped in four Books; however, not only the four Books are independent of each other, but also the individual pieces can be selected rather freely by the performer, and combined with each other following one’s liking. Indeed, the complete performance or recording of the entire cycle is very seldom heard, and was possibly not even imagined by the composer – one reason being its extreme technical difficulty and its length.
True, Iberia was premiered (but each book separately) by a single pianist, the extremely gifted French musician Blanche Selva; she also interacted with the composer, suggesting alternative technical solutions particularly for the two last Books. This happened notwithstanding the fact that Albeniz himself was an excellent pianist (and, indeed, only a very proficient pianist could imagine such a complex piano writing), and that Albeniz had conceived the cycle with yet another pianist in mind, the Catalan musician Joaquim Malats.
Speaking about his own work, Albeniz himself stated that he had led “españolismo and technical difficulty to the ultimate extreme”. Actually, referring to a famous recording by legendary pianist Alicia De Larrocha (who recorded the complete cycle thrice), musical critic Donal Henahan humorously affirmed: “There is really nothing in Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia that a good three-handed pianist could not master, given unlimited years of practice and permission to play at half tempo. But there are few pianists thus endowed”. On the technical plane, Albeniz demonstrates the descendance of his concepts from the Lisztean school of piano virtuosity; however, Albeniz systematically eschews virtuosity for its own sake, and always subordinates it to the needs of style, timbre and dramatic construction. On the other hand, Albeniz clearly possessed a marked feeling for the spectacular, and he explicitly conceived Iberia as a showcase for its intended performer (i.e. Malats) and for his particular qualities of technical proficiency and musical intensity.
The pieces refer to specific places of the Iberian Peninsula, evoked by means of their typical music but also of their noises and of their rites. Albeniz was careful to point out that his use of national elements was far from a simple “copy and paste” of characteristic tunes, rhythms or modes: “I never utilise the ‘raw material’ in its crude state”, as he famously put it. He did not take pictures (or, worse, postcards) of his native land; rather, he transformed his memories through a conscious artistic process and a partly unconscious itinerary of appropriation and reinterpretation, veiled by nostalgia and elusiveness.
These are abundantly found in the first piece, Evocación, which – indeed – evokes rather than narrating or describing. This piece is structured in a Sonata allegro form, grounding its main themes on examples from the typical folk dances of southern and northern Spain. The former is remembered through the dance-forms of fandango and malaguena, while the latter is symbolised by the jota.
A much more concrete and down-to-earth atmosphere pervades the second piece, El Puerto, setting the stage in the haven of Santa María, in the vicinity of Cadiz; the musical elements are derived from the dance known as zapateado, an example of which had been used by Pablo de Sarasate in his famous bravura work for the violin. The third and last piece of Book One is one of the most famous of the series. It portrays the feast of Corpus Christi in Sevilla, and follows the display of a religious procession. The various groups of people participating in the religious rite have each a musical expression of its own, and include marching bands (one of which is heard performing a popular song known as La tarara), but also the saetas (literally “arrows”), by which the crowd expressed its religious feeling through intense cries. The piece reaches an impressive climax marked as fffff by the composer, followed by a diminution of the sound intensity as the procession fades away.
Book Two opens with Rondeña, whose name alludes to the city of Ronda; however, the piece is only loosely inspired by the local music, and is memorable especially for its polyrhythmic patterns whereby tempi in 3/4 and 6/8 intertwine in complex hemiolas. This particular rhythmic element is found also in the following piece, Almería, evoking an Andalusian city bound to Albeniz’s family history. Here touches of cante jondo are found: a typical expression of the land, and a profoundly impressive musical manifestation. A link with the gipsy tradition is shared also by the concluding piece, Triana, after the name of a quarter of the city of Seville: the dominant influence here is that of the flamenco, whose stages and constituting elements are carefully evoked.
Albeniz’s example was followed, roughly ten years later, by another Spanish musician who had made himself known in France, i.e. Manuel De Falla. If Iberia was the Latin name for Spain, Bætia was that for Andalusia; and if Albeniz had conceived Iberia for Malats, the Fantasia Bætica was tailored upon the figure of legendary pianist Artur Rubinstein. The dedicatee, however, abandoned the piece after premiering it, finding it to be longish and non-idiomatic for the piano. This demonstrates that even genius pianists may occasionally fail to see the beauty of a piece: this work by De Falla almost miraculously blends musical influences from a variety of provenances (including gypsy, Sephardic, Indian and Andalusian) while reworking them in the unique idiom of his own.
A still different approach to the musical heritage of his homeland is that found in the Cançons i danses by Federico Mompou, a Catalan composer and pianist. Similar to Iberia, the collective title indicates a group of fifteen pieces showing a unified conception, but also a remarkable independence. (Indeed, in this case, two pieces are not even written for the piano, and therefore a complete performance by a single musician is normally impossible). The fifteen pieces are actually fifteen pairs, consisting of a slow Cançó (song) and a lively Dansa (dance); in most cases, Mompou employs as the pieces’ building blocks some original and clearly identifiable folk tunes from the Catalan heritage. No. 6, included in the selection recorded here, was dedicated to Artur Rubinstein, the dedicatee of De Falla’s Fantasia, while another great pianist, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, used to play it frequently as an encore.
Together, these works by Albeniz, De Falla and Mompou constitute a powerful fresco, suggesting the moods, influences, styles and impressions of a unique land, with a unique musical story and heritage, and with a unique personality which constantly fascinates and charms all those who encounter its music.
Album Notes by Chiara Bertoglio