Alma Guitarra Vol.1

Composer(s)

Federico Moreno Torroba (b Madrid, 3 March 1891; d Madrid, 12 Sept 1982). Spanish composer, conductor and critic. He first studied music with his father, José Moreno Ballesteros, an organist and teacher at the Madrid Conservatory, and with whom he collaborated on his first zarzuela, Las decididas (1912). He later studied composition with Conrado del Campo at the Royal Conservatory, where his tone poem La ajorca de oro was first performed in 1918. In 1924 he married Pilar Larregla, the daughter of a Navarrese composer; the folk music of Navarra along with that of Castile was to serve as a major source of inspiration in his music. Although not a guitarist himself, in the 1920s his growing friendship with Segovia inspired him to begin writing for the guitar, and the resulting compositions such as Sonatina (1924) and Piezas características (1931) are among his finest works. He also established himself as a composer for the stage, and his zarzuela La mesonera de Tordesillas was first performed to critical acclaim in 1925, while his most famous zarzuela, Luisa Fernanda (1932), is a representative of the last flowering of the zarzuela grande. Between 1925 and 1935 he was active as a music critic for Madrid periodicals, especially Informaciones, and used this position and his brief term in the Second Republic's five-member Junta Nacional de Música to promote greater government support for music.

With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, Moreno Torroba retreated to Navarra with his family, avoiding involvement in the conflict. With the ascendancy of Franco he became one of the dominant figures in Spanish music, along with Turina and Rodrigo. Rejecting the European avant garde, they embraced a conservative nationalist aesthetic that was accepted in the new political environment. In 1946 he formed a zarzuela company that toured the Americas for two seasons (he had directed productions of his zarzuelas in Buenos Aires annually since 1934). In the 1950s Moreno Torroba's satirical zarzuela Bienvenido, Mister Dolar (1954) reflected the growing political and military cooperation between the USA and Spain along with the influx of American capital and culture, while María Manuela (1957) became his most popular zarzuela of the decade.

His output diminished as the public appeal of the zarzuela waned in the 1960s and his own work became increasingly seen as dated. Consequently, he devoted more time to conducting and recording, returning several times to Latin America to conduct performances of his own works. He continued to compose for the guitar, however, writing the Concierto de Castilla (1960) for Segovia, Homenaje a la seguidilla (1962) and Diálogos entre guitarra y orquesta (1977), among the best of his concertos. The two books of Castillos de España (1970 and 1978) for solo guitar are among his most notable successes in that genre. Among his last works is his second opera El poeta, first performed in 1980 with Plácido Domingo.

Moreno Torroba was a major figure in Spanish music of the 20th century who flourished despite the political and social upheavals that surrounded him. His music has often been described as ‘castizo’, employing elements of folk and art music which are of distinctly Spanish ‘pure cast’. A nationalist, he believed that fidelity to Spain's heritage, rather than imitation of foreign models, would lead to the universality of Spanish music. His musical palette was not limited to strict folklorism, and he acknowledged a wider musical influence through the works of Debussy, Ravel, Franck, Wagner and, in later years, Bartók. His accessible, lyrical style maintains a strong sense of tonality through the use of conventional forms while judiciously employing extended triadic harmonies, modality, remote modulations and colourful orchestration. His zarzuelas also draw upon expressly regional motifs and references to traditional and contemporary urban culture.

Moreno Torroba held many prominent positions including Comisario del Teatro Zarzuela, director of the Compañía Lírica and, from 1974, president of the Sociedad General de Autores de España, through which he served as a cultural diplomat. He was elected as the director of the Academia de Bellas Artes de S Fernando in 1978, and died four years later at the age of 91.

Joaquin Rodrigo: (b Sagunto, 22 Nov 1901; d Madrid, 6 July 1999). Spanish composer. Blind from the age of three, he began his musical education at an early age and took lessons in composition with Francisco Antich in Valencia. In 1927 he moved to Paris as a pupil of Dukas at the Ecole Normale. After his marriage in Valencia in 1933 to the Turkish pianist Victoria Kamhi, he returned to Paris for further study at the Conservatoire and the Sorbonne. He lived and worked in France and Germany during the Spanish Civil War, and returned finally to Madrid in 1939. Soon after the première in 1940 of his first concerto, the Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar, he began to be recognized as one of the leading composers in Spain. Apart from writing a great deal of music during the following years, he was active as an academic and music critic, writing for several newspapers and publishing articles on a wide range of topics. He also worked in the music department of Radio Nacional and for the Spanish National Organization for the Blind (ONCE). In 1947 he was appointed to the Manuel de Falla Chair of Music at Complutense University, Madrid, created especially for him, and in 1950 he was elected to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Fernando.

During these and subsequent years he made several tours throughout Spain, Europe, the Americas and Japan, teaching, giving piano recitals and lectures, and attending concerts and festivals of his own music. Amongst the most important of these were Argentina (1949), Turkey (1953 and 1972), Japan (1973), Mexico (1975) and London (1986). Distinctions awarded to Rodrigo included the Gran Cruz de Alfonso X el Sabio (1953), the Légion d’Honneur (1963), election as a member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts of Belgium (1978) to the place left vacant on the death of Benjamin Britten, and honorary doctorates from the University of Salamanca (1964), the University of Southern California (1982), the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (1988), and the Universities of Alicante, Madrid (both 1989) and Exeter (1990). A series of concerts and recitals to celebrate his 90th birthday took place throughout the world during 1991 and 1992. Two significant distinctions of Rodrigo’s old age were the conferment of the hereditary titles ‘Marqueses de los Jardines de Aranjuez’ on the composer and his wife Victoria by King Juan Carlos I in 1992, and the award of the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes in 1996.

During the second half of the 20th century Rodrigo came to occupy a position in Spanish musical life close to that of Manuel de Falla in the first. Like his mentor, he cultivated a style far removed from the major currents of European musical development and, as with Falla, his music needs to be judged in the context of Spain’s classical and traditional music, art and literature. His compositions number around 170, including 11 concertos, numerous orchestral and choral works, 60 songs, some two dozen pieces each for piano and guitar, and music for the ballet, theatre and cinema. His published writings (1999) also demonstrate a remarkable breadth of knowledge of music and the arts. Rodrigo’s music attracted favourable attention from both critics and performers from the start of his career, first in Valencia and Paris and subsequently worldwide. His first two guitar concertos, Concierto de Aranjuez and Fantasía para un gentilhombre, also achieved remarkable popularity. From the late 1970s onwards, however, appreciation of his music began to broaden. Wider knowledge of his music demonstrated that the charge that Rodrigo merely repeated the formula of his first concerto in later ones could no longer be substantiated, and recordings showed the quality of such works as the symphonic poem Ausencias de Dulcinea (1948), the Scarlatti-inspired piano suite Cinco sonatas de Castilla (1950–51), the Invocación y danza for solo guitar, written in homage to Falla (1961), the austere Himnos de los neófitos de Qumrán (1965), the brilliant Concierto madrigal for two guitars (1966), based on a Renaissance love-song, or the serenely beautiful Cántico de San Francisco de Asís (1982). Happily the composer’s 90th birthday was also the occasion for thoughtful and appreciative critical re-evaluations of Rodrigo’s music.

Rodrigo’s music was fundamentally conservative, ‘neocasticista’, or ‘faithful to a tradition’, to use the composer’s own words. His first works revealed the influence of composers such as Granados, Ravel and Stravinsky, but his individual musical voice was soon heard in the songs, piano works and orchestral pieces composed during the 1920s and 30s. As he matured, his wide knowledge of and sympathy with the music and culture of earlier times bore fruit. His forms were traditional, but appropriate for his purposes, and his musical language, drawn from both Classical and nationalist sources, underpinned a melodic gift of remarkable eloquence. He made many of the finest settings of classical Spanish poetry, his guitar pieces are in the central repertory, and his concertos are the most significant such works composed in Spain.

Ramón Montoya (Salazar),
(b nr Toledo, 2 Nov 1880; d 1949). Spanish flamenco guitarist of Gypsy origin. He launched his career at the turn of the century playing in Madrid cafés, and went on to make his name as accompanist to the renowned famous cantaor Antonio Chacón from 1912 to 1926. Llobet Soles, who was known to Montoya, may have inspired him to adapt traditional flamenco songs such as soleares, siguiriyas and bulerías for solo guitar. Today these songs are standard repertory for the flamenco tocaor. Montoya gave a landmark recital to a packed Salle Pleyel, Paris, in 1936, and also made some important recordings there collected in Harmonia Mundi’s ‘Grandes figures du flamenco’ series (1988).