Mathis Cathignol offers a surprise at the Denia International Piano Festival

Despite my attending literally thousands of concerts in the past, each new offering still has the potential to surprise, to go where music has never taken me. The experience does not often do so, despite the fact that it rarely disappoints. Also, approaching a concert that I am responsible for makes me nervous and makes me also less able to relax to absorb whatever is on offer. After organising well over five hundred concerts, it remains the case that each new one is a challenge and that challenge can militate against personal enjoyment. Without the support of skilled people, musicians and technicians alike, the presentation of a concert would be impossible, and I have to record the fact that in Denia last night we had the best of both professions.

A program, however, can create expectations, but in the case of the latest Denia International Piano Festival concert, Mathis Cathignol, a young pianist from France, offered Granados, Fauré and Chopin. One the face of things, this was not going to surprise, but by the end of the concert, Mathis Cathignol had played so elegantly and so poetically that the surprise lasted from the first note to the last.

Mathis Cathignol is a 26 year-old French pianist. Before the concert, he asked whether it was normal or acceptable to have music open on the stage. My reply, as ever, was that he had to decide. I have learned over the years to go with a musician’s flow and not try to impose anything. In the event, he played the Granados and the Fauré from scores, but the Chopin from memory. Eventually, all that matters is the musical communication and more than a hundred people in the audience were left in no doubt about the quality of that.

Mathis Cathignol started his concert with three pieces by Granados. A Frenchman playing Spanish music to an audience in Spain is taking a risk. But Mathis Cathignol’s playing left no one unconvinced of his ability to communicate via this language. The playing, and with it the expression was exquisite. The phrases, even the specifically Spanish in a Spanish idiom, were played beautifully. What’s more, the music made perfect sense. Too often in Granados and other Spanish composers, a pianist can emphasize the stereotype and thereby lose contact with the overall effect. Mathis Cathignol did not fall into this trap and indeed his shaping of Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor was exceptional. It is a piece that I personally have heard many times, but Mathis Cathignol’s interpretation completely renewed the experience.

I do go to a lot of concerts, and I cannot remember any recent program that included three substantial pieces by Fauré for piano solo. On the face of it, this programming was conventional, but on reflection, I admit that it was something special. For me, Fauré is a quintessentially impressionist composer, and the three nocturnes completely fit the bill. Mathis Cathignol was poetic and expressive, managing to convey subtlety of tone, harmony and shape that sounded truly faithful to the composers intention.

The Chopin that followed was more of a concert piece. But in the hands of Mathis Cathignol, it became more than a series of show off variations and became a rounded, playful examination of what variation form could deliver.

In the end, the young French pianist played Liszt’s Chapelle de Guillaume Tell from the first year of pilgrimage, Années de Pèlerinage I. As an encore, it was a substantial piece and its reception in the hall suggested that the audience wanted even more.

Mathis Cathignol is already an accomplished pianist, whose musical communication is sound. He plays with a lightness of touch which is astounding but can also deliver pace and volume apparently at the same time. He also has the element of surprise which promises greatness.

Spanish National Orchestra under Pablo González plays Espla and Mahler in ADDA Alicante

 

In Alicante last night, the Spanish National Orchestra made its debut in the ADDA auditorium. They chose to play a piece by an Alicante composer to start their program, El Sueño de Eros, The Dream of Eros by Óscar Esplá. In Alicante city, there is a main thoroughfare named after the composer, and indeed one of its prestigious conservatories also bears his name. It is a name, however, that few concert-goers away from the Costa Blanca will recognise. 

During a long career, Óscar Esplá wrote over one hundred works. He lived from 1886 to 1976 and studied in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century, and it shows. His music of the time shows a strong French influence, especially that of Debussy. But El Sueño de Eros predates the time he spent in Paris and indeed the composer was only a young man when he wrote the work in 1910. It was in fact while Óscar Esplá was studying first engineering and later philosophy in Barcelona that he received a handwritten text of a lyrical poem from the Alicante writer Gabriel Miró and the work lay unperformed for two years. It is thus revealing how French influences are the fore. The composer had studied with his father and two Spanish teachers, and he must have developed a love for the music of Debussy from an early age.

As its title suggests, the music is dreamlike, not actually finding a tonal identity, eschewing recognisably “Spanish” themes, though at one point, there is a suggestion of a local song in the strings. The work is based on Gabriel Miró’s poem in which Eros dreams of love, is caressed by the moon. wakes up startled, fires his arrows, and the moon, wounded, retreats. It is about unrequited love, and the uncertainty that can induce. El Sueño de Eros was the only collaboration between the writer and the composer, who continued to share respect for one another.

Here we are we are in the world Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande. Nothing is real, even suggestions are only part-heard. There is some influence of Richard Strauss here, particularly in the use of divided strings. Óscar Esplá often used juxtaposition of two quite mundane themes to heighten musical drama, but in this piece, it is the atmospheric orchestration that impressed. It certainly is an interesting piece that should be played more often, as should Óscar Esplá’s other compositions.

In the second half of the concert, the Spanish National Orchestra under Pablo González played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Personally, I found the attention to detail by Pablo González interesting, but it rather got in the way of the music flow. I also found some of the tempi quite strange. The first movement, for instance, is a funeral march, but the tempo chosen stressed the funeral, not the march. These things are always a matter of taste. There is no right and wrong, only difference and originality.

The orchestra’s playing was suitably dynamic on virtuosic, but I for one found that the pause for tuning after the third movement reduced the impact of the adagietto, which is such a change from the tutti of the opening movements. As ever, Gustav Mahler’s concept was exhilarating and moving.

Programa de mano de 8 oct 2026 - Denia International Piano Festival - Mathis Cathignol

 

New season of ADDA concerts opens with The Ring Without Words

 

The new season of ADDA concerts, titled Naturaleza, vida y amor, began last night with an unusual program. Single work programs are often symphonies or oratorios, or theatre pieces scores played primarily as musical experience. But The Ring Without Words is an arrangement, which is unusual.

The work is not a reconstruction. Neither is it an invented fantasy. Commissioned by Telarc from Lorin Maazel, The Ring Without Words is pure Wagner, his own music as selected by the conductor who must have led performances of the Ring several times. He made no revisions, added no notes and stuck to the running order of the story. What Lorin Maazel did might be characterized as a musician’s technical skill, but this would miss a point. What Maazel accomplished with this work is almost incredibly creative.

Lorin Maazel effectively condensed fifteen hours or so of music drama into a seventy-minute orchestral suite which kept Wagner’s music and story in the correct order. What he created was an orchestral showpiece of the most wonderful kind. It is, of course, full of familiar music, some of which is as well-known as any pop song, even more than a century and a half after it was written.

But what is also amazing about the work is that it comes together to tell the story. Almost absent from Lorin Maazel’s construction is Valhalla, the Giants, the fire music at the end of Die Walkűre and importantly Siegried’s forging of Nothung. Fafner is there as a dragon in just a few chords before he is similarly dispatched. But what remains is coherent and convincing.

The Ring Without Words preserves Wagner’s orchestration, which means that the sound of a hundred musicians on stage is filled out with Wagner tubas, whose penetrating tones underpin an already vast score. What is so amazing to an audience member listening to this music is the realization of how utterly original it was in its style. Almost incredibly, we are talking about the middle of the nineteenth century. All right, there was Berlioz and there was Meyerbeer and there was Liszt. But Wagner surpassed all of these in the way that he integrated his choice of material into the orchestral texture to create a musical language that was truly communicative. Thus the experience of The Ring Without Words is not primarily loud or brash. There is a genuine and successful attempt to stick to the story, so we have Wotan telling Brünnhilde why he has to surround her in fire – this will hurt me more than it hurts you - but then there is only a hint of his call to Loge to set the fire.

Lorin Maazzel was not the only person to create a purely orchestral score from the Ring. The Ring – An Orchestral Adventure by Henk de Vlieger is another attempt and also lasts about seventy minutes in concert. But whoever the arranger, it is Richard Wagner that survives via his utterly original music.

Last but not least, I have to mention the impeccable playing we heard from the ADDA orchestra. The quality of their playing means that the concert series will be a success.

 

Size matters, but length is not important – Einstein On The Beach in Valencia

 

A performance of a piece of music-theatre that lasts in its originally scored version for between four and five hours, for most concertgoers, is a once in a lifetime experience. If the piece is Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Richard Wagner, it is a one-off experience that a particular audience member I heard recently is determined should stay that way, though I personally have never heard a performance of the work in the theatre. Other time-consuming giants have to include Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Parsifal, and Tristan und Isolde, Soarabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum, Feldman’s String Quartet No2, to name a few. Indeed I have sat through many performances of the Wagner works both in the theatre and in recording. At one hour and twenty minutes, Steve Reich’s Drumming hardly figures, despite its reputation of being interminable. I have attended three performances of the work and would go to hear it again tomorrow, if I had the chance.

At four to five hours duration in its original conception, Einstein On The Beach by Philip Glass is right up there on the consumption of time. The performance in Valencia last night by the Ictus Ensemble alongside Collegium Vocale Gent lasted just three and a half hours in their adaptation. About two hours into the piece, I reflected on the fact that in the last fortnight I have been in four art galleries and seen hundreds of works and even photographed many of them, but the total time viewing the visual art was only just more than this opera would take. Perhaps this devotion of time to music when things visual can be potentially taken in at a glance is a problem for the uninitiated. For the devoted music fan, however, time seems to dissolve to nothing when the music starts. But it does require listening.

Perhaps it is this control of time, rather in primarily Neville Shute’s apocalyptic, nuclear age book On The Beach that provided Philip Glass with the stimulus to compose. Only he can tell, and, specifically, artists are probably the last people to be conscious of such a stimulus. That said, Einstein On The Beach does control time. Despite the fact that the music rushes along, the changes happen slowly and it is the changes that provide the meat of the experience, landmarks within the sound landscape. It was Robert Wilson that originally provided the composer with the scenario, and he wanted things to be formalistic, never linear. As a consequence, the music seems to meander through time, meeting itself along the way.

In many of the choral passages, the singers simply recite numbers or jumble them up. The sequence, thus, is broken, but one–two–three–four–five–six–seven–eight does feature quite a lot. The other vocal stimuli are simply open vowels are solfège syllables, so the primary vehicle for expression becomes rhythm and change. The number four featured extensively, the performers being given prompts to indicate four repetitions of a pattern, the next “one” indicating a change. One section unexpectedly terminated on a three.

Philip Glass’s music has been criticized for being repetitious. It is repetitious and that is part of the point, because via repetition change becomes amplified. Personally, when I hear Philip Glass’s music, I am struck by the thought that this is JS Bach’s inspiration in the twentieth century. I know that this will sound outrageous to fans of the baroque but just listen to Glass’s Etudes.

Einstein On The Beach was premiered fifty years ago. When I was born, late Brahms was that old. It is at work of its time and when it was written, the composer wrote mainly for his own ensemble, hence the orchestration. No fan of opera will be happy with this work without introduction. But here there is no spectacle, no plot, no characterization. It is absolute music, absolute experience with neither consequence nor emotion, though still setting a scenario. It simply exists, and, despite it being a one off, will live forever in the memory.

 

Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović open the fourth Denia International Piano Festival with works by Beethoven, Papanopulo, Moszkowski and Ravel

 

Last night Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović opened the Denia International Piano Festival with a concert of music for four hands. The Croatian pianists included in their varied programme a piece by Boris Papandopulolo, the giant of twentieth century Croatian musical life, whose music remains almost unknown to Western European audiences, despite his having published over four hundred works during a lifetime of music making.

Papandopulo’s compositional style started with Croatian folk music, but he was from the start a sophisticated, eclectic composer, who could draw on many of the styles of European music. As he got older, his music became more dissonant, and he even sought in influence from jazz. Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović included the folk inspired but highly complex and rhythmic Dance Suite by Papandopulo.

Each of the suite’s four movements drew spontaneous applause from the Denia audience who, over the years, has shown itself to be open to the exploration of the music of lesser-known composers. On this occasion, the often fiery rhythms, and broken harmonies of these dancers provided excitement in what was eventually essentially a celebration of folk tradition in the hands of a sophisticated composer.

The concert opened with Beethoven’s Opus 6, his Piano Sonata for Four Hands. This is a short work in two movements with light, playful, dance like motives, which were a perfect contrast with the intensely rhythmic twentieth century dances that followed.

In a second half on a Spanish theme, we heard Moskovsky Spanish Dancers Opus12 and then the enigmatic Rhapsodie Españole of Ravel. This latter piece is more often heard in its orchestral version, but at the heart of the work there is a habanera which was originally composed in 1895 for two pianos but was never published separately. In 1907 Ravel composed three other pieces to accompany it and so today the Rhapsodie Españole is a four-movement piece which contains much quiet and reflective music, especially in the first two movements. As ever, with Ravel, it says much about its composer, less about its inspiration.

Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović finished with an encore of Dvořak’s Slavonic Dance Opus72 No2 whose gentle, swaying rhythm brought the evening to a close. The next concert in the Denia International Piano Festival is on 8 October and features French pianist Mathis Cathignol in works by Granados, Fauré and Chopin.

Programa de 19 sep 2026 Denia International Piano Festival - Duo Kos-Gasparovic