Ligeti, Coggiola, Bareilles, Nodari, Cassado: Instantes, Contemporary Music for Cello Solo

Description

In the seventeenth century, the idea of writing works for unaccompanied cello was a pioneering one; it had been attempted notably by some Italian musicians, including Domenico Gabrielli. In the eighteenth century, their heritage was received and brought to perfection by Johann Sebastian Bach, with his magnificent Six Suites for unaccompanied cello. These works, however, remained largely unperformed throughout the following century. The few who did know them and appreciate their greatness (such as Robert Schumann) thought them unsuitable to the concert hall, and therefore provided them with piano accompaniments. Following the model of Paganini’s Capriccios for solo violin, similar virtuoso pieces for unaccompanied cello were written in the nineteenth century, but they frequently remained within the domain of the “etudes” (significantly, also many early editions of Bach’s Suites were titled “Etudes”). Only in the twentieth century did the unaccompanied cello acquire a standing of its own in the concert programmes; that century and the following saw the flourishing of the repertoire for unaccompanied cello, as is testified by the works performed in this Da Vinci Classics album. (C.B.)

The figure of the composer György Ligeti (1923 – 2006) is principally related to his role as the first magnitude of the postwar avant-garde. Ligeti youth production is less known, even if it has been progressively discovered and appreciated. It includes the now-famous piano cycle of Musica Ricercata and Sonata for solo cello, written between 1948 and 1953.
Sonata for solo cello is a piece that can be placed in a post – Bartókian environment still linked to a tonal, if not even neoclassical conception. However, the piece already has traits of the mature Ligetian poetics, such as the nightly, vampire, and spooky atmosphere created by pizzicato notes in glissando with which the first movement begins. This tendency alternates with severe polyphonic writing in which it’s easy finding references to Bach’s cellist production, which also reveals a contrapuntal cult that the Hungarian composer will never really abandon.
An identifiable classical element in this Sonata is its cyclical dimension: there are in fact many recursive elements in the whole composition. An unsettling surprise consists of the return of the second melodic motif from the first movement in the middle of the following “whim” which is a virtuosic Perpetuum mobile, here really debtor to Bartók’s awesomeness.
Although this work can be considered just as a taste of an artistic phase still in training, it presents prodromes of pieces among the most important of the Darmstadtian avant-garde, composed by Ligeti for strings, such as Second Quartet and Ramifications (for string orchestra). Compared to his illustrious colleagues and in the narrow margins of a radical avant-garde writing (of which Sonata for cello is then a valuable preparatory study), Ligeti has been able to express better himself and his hallucinated and unique expressiveness precisely in writing for strings, made of extreme contrasts and colors, some of which are also found in the second movement of the piece presented here.
Music by Paolo Coggiola from Milan (b. in 1967) has sometimes been defined as “neo-romantic”. Coggiola feels close to neo-romantic Italian instances, standing out for his ambition to get back to an unavoidable need for a dialogue with the contemporary listener and a renewed musical narration, far from self-referentiality and abstraction.
The diptych presented here seems to be summarizing some of the instances of this CD’s various pieces, such as cognizant continuity with the past, but in the spirit of contemporary eclecticism. In fact, Coggiola’s music can be also defined eclectic: he isn’t interested in an extremist stylization, but rather in a strong expressive instance, wide-raging, which is lyrical, but also subtly ironic at the same time.
The romantic closeness of Coggiola to a poetics of nature led him to be also defined as a “neo-pagan” composer. A taste of this tendency can be experienced in these pieces which are focused on naturalistic and temporal phenomena. A precise study can be noticed in these works which are dedicated to music chromatic contrasts and to the dimension of the metamorphosis, a real obsession for the composer who considers it as the ultimate expression of the art itself, aligned to Ovid’s timeless message, which can be found in some fleeting glimpses of the final solar dance.
In his splendid lectures dedicated to tango, Borges states that: «the word “Argentine ” […] arouses two concepts in any part of the world, “gaucho “and” tango” which are two words that correspond to typical Argentine man and music. One would say that this association of ideas is universal […]». Later, telling one of his stories, he seals the idea that tango is closely linked with death. Therefore, it is natural, and not at all nostalgic, for contemporary authors, such as Miguel Bareilles, to cultivate the spirit of tango. His recent Tres preludios tanguisticos begin with a singular metronomic indication, which adds to the floating tactus the expression “tremendamente romántico y con sentimento tanguero”. It is conceivable, we suspect, also an ironic vein, but the character of these pieces (which are conceived as a flow without solution of continuity) is thus virtually marked. Bareilles’s style could be defined as post-Piazzolla: even in Bareilles, the tango is now freed from rigid articulatory demands, as indeed the dances of the Bach suites already were. The reference to Bach is quite pertinent here: in fact, the first piece is an evident reinterpretation of Kantor’s cellist writing, here transfigured into a painful sensuality (not lacking the indispensable and ancient “bass of lament” as a unifying element) which literally belongs to another musical hemisphere.
Characteristic of these pieces is also an idiomatic and masterful instrumental writing, which arrives, in the third prelude, at the doubling of the articulation, created on one hand, by the left-hand pizzicati, and on the other by a passionate, almost tragic melody, which is transfigured into virtuosic and very bright drawings, an authentic expression of that Eros and Thanatos topos which is the real essence of the most authentic tango, and which is proposed here most openly and sincerely.
The title of Marco Nodari’s piece (b. in 1969), Dualismi e contrasti, could be considered almost a declaration of poetics: his music is open to the multiplicity, to the richness of stimuli and suggestions of the present (and the past) without ideological preclusions, and with a strong propensity for the communicative and narrative dimension, a sort of red thread of this CD. In this sense, Marco Nodari’s music could be assimilated to the postmodernism mare magnum. Multiplicity and contrasts are realized here not only through a wide range of techniques – which also include the percussive element, of popular (and perhaps guitar) derivation -, but also through a subtle play of stylistic elements and recursive formal articulations (virtually oriented to a classic rondo), which create a kaleidoscopic piece, in which echoes of the historical twentieth century (we like to think of Brittenians) alternate with others in which we perceive a refined reinterpretation of suggestions derived from minimalism and perhaps also from the cross-over, but without that indulgence towards the collage that characterized many avant-garde works from the second postwar period: instead, in a perspective of certain recovery of an expressive gesture that is ultimately unitary and wide-ranging (and here also distancing itself in an original way from postmodern “small narratives”), it culminates with contrasts dissolving in an episode of happy and clear virtuosity.
The production of the Spanish Gaspar Cassadó (1897-1966) is intimately linked to his activity as a successful cellist. He’s well known as a wonderful performer and recipient of pieces by some of the most important composers of his time. His Suite for solo cello (which dates to 1926) has settled itself over the years as a classic (in competition with Benjamin Britten’s Suites) of the historical twentieth-century cello repertoire. His writing is free from experimentalism or deep modernist concerns. His style is rather an heir to the cellist baggage of the past, but with original suggestions of Spanish music, reinterpreted in the light of thoughtful and successful use of compositional techniques from the twentieth century. The key to the very happy outcome of this suite certainly lies in the unique mastery of instrumental means, which are transfigured into an intimately and profoundly musical substance; but not only that, also in an intense and elegant lyricism that is expressed, for example, through the use of a sort of short and poignant idée fixe in the first movement. Thus, the “surrender” to the tradition of Spanish dances of the second movement (here, to tell the truth, a Sardana, which is a typical Catalan dance and almost a cultural symbol) has nothing sweet or sketchy, it is extremely mercurial and built classically. In the third movement, the distinctive national character becomes obvious. Therefore, at this point, we are aware of one of the greatest merits in Cassadó’s music, which is the excellent clarity of the compositional sign, which, although extolling the resources of his instrument in an almost insuperable way, always remains light and nervous.

English Translation by Elena Indraccolo