Costa Blanca Arts Update - Music to broaden the mind, three concerts in Alfas del Pi, nothing standard in sight.

 

Alfas del Pi Music Society offered three May concerts to complete the first part of its annual season. But these were three remarkably different concerts, each challenging in its own way, each presenting a surprising mix of the partially familiar and the less well-known. It was a repertoire to broaden a listener’s experience and it achieved that and much more.

The three concerts featured solo guitar, solo harp and a duo of cello and piano. The four musicians presented some fifteen works between them and all from different composers. There was not a single German or Austrian Classicist or Romantic within hearing distance. There was no Chopin or Liszt, no Debussy or even Shostakovich or Tchaikovsky. There was French and Hungarian music but also Argentinian, Uruguayan, American, Spanish, Swiss and Italian, alongside just a little German baroque.

Javier Llanes began the cycle with an evening of solo guitar music. He started with Manuel de Falla’s Homenaje a la Tumba de Debussy and then continued with the Baroque suite L’Infidele by the German composer Samuel Weiss, a composer whose identity might be in the Rococo, but his mind was clearly in the future. This was the closest our weekend approached to Classicism. The Hungarian Johan Kasper Mertz provided the next piece in the form of his Elegie, a piece of deep Romantic emotion. Mauro Giuliani’s Rossiniana Number One reminded is all how much improved Rossini’s music can become when it’s not in his own hands! And the concert ended with Una Lemnosita por el Amor de Dios of Agustin Barrios, which offered a moment of reflection to end rather than a grand rousing celebration. The effect was magical.

And speaking of magic, this is what Italian harpist Floraleda Sacchi generates from her instrument with such ease that perhaps her fingers don’t need to contact the strings. Now the harp repertoire might not be known to the average concert goer, which means that any solo recital featuring the instrument must also introduce the audience to new experience. But his did not matter in the least to this audience, such was the poetry of the playing. And by the evening’s end we all felt as if we have as if we’d like to continue hearing this music forever.

Floraleda Sacchi began with the Gitana of Alfonse Hasselmans and followed that with two pieces but Argentinian composers. Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion was the closest the weekend came to popularity and it is a work that has become not only a familiar, but close to cliché, though not on the harp. Claudia Montero‘s Evocaciones followed and it proved to be a real revelation, given that it was both substantial and challenging, being harmonically and rhythmically varied, besides stunningly and refreshingly elegant.

Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis formed the substantial filling in this meal-sized sandwich of the program. Floraleda’s choice of repeats within an already deliberately repetitive experience metamorphosed this piece into a real meditation in which the audience willingly and profitably entered. The overall stillness of the piece was suggested by the near constant left hand arpeggio, whilst the soft commentaries in the treble contrasted, leaving the bass notes to provide what sounded like a commentary. Overall Philip Glass in Floraleda Sacchi’s hands created a landscape that was forever of interest.

Floraleda Sacchi’s program finished with two pieces by Ludovico Enaudi, Dietro l’incanto and Oltremare, whose episodic detail contrasted well with what had preceded it, and the audience’s response to the evening proved nothing less than rapturous. Two encores followed, Merengue Rojo by Alfredo Rolando Ortiz and Images by the harpist, herself. Not many in the audience had ever heard a concert of solo harp. Not many of them will ever forget the experience.

A third concert in three days would have to contrast strongly with the others to prove memorable. To say that David and Carlos Apellaniz did provide adequate contrast would be an understatement. Both the guitar and harp are soft voices in a concert hall. A cello and piano, however, can generate quite a lot of sound!

David Apellaniz was to play two cello concertos with piano accompaniment. This would be a feat in itself, but to play the Honegger concerto followed by Milhaud’s first was a task and a half.  Arthur Honegger’s music can be severely neoclassical. It can also be tender and reflective, and this performance made the most of this vivid and exciting contrast. Some of the textures in this sound are enduringly memorable. Darius Milhaud’s music always seems to have popular song nearby, though the proximity is often only hinted at through an almost transparent screen of modernism. The overall result is one of melodic and rhythmic excitement and energy.

After working very hard indeed, David left the stage for Carlos Apellaniz to bring everything to a close with a solo piano performance of Gershwin‘s Rhapsody In Blue. If we needed more energy in this concert, we truly got it by the bagfull. This was a vivid reading of a familiar work, an interpretation that had to merge the orchestral part with the original solo piano, a feat that was both challenging for the performer and rewarding for the audience, an audience perhaps familiar with the work but not in this format.

And at the end of the weekend of three concerts, one is reminded that there is a lot of music out there, that it is all worth discovering, that it is all nothing less than utterly rewarding, if only one is willing to step outside of the predictability of what we already know. There must always be space for individual voices and they should never be crowded out by our pre-directed expectations.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Cassado and Chopin in Alfas del Pi, Stravinsky and Elgar in Alicante

 

Just over a year ago, it would not have been anything special to declare that it had been possible to attend four quality concerts in this area over three days. And then there was covid. Here is Spain, we had a strict initial lockdown, but since then schools have stayed open and some cultural spaces have kept running in spite of restrictions on numbers. Before saying anything else, it is necessary to remind oneself that the new norm has involved social distancing, fifty per cent capacity for venues, compulsory hand sanitiser, masks, the recording of contact details and a temperature test on entry. This has severely restricted audience’s willingness to attend and has persuaded many, perhaps a majority of venues to cease activity altogether. In addition, performers’ travel has been as restricted as the population in general, despite there being the possibility of exemption permits for work. The combination of restrictions on travel, availability of travel and reluctant venues has severely curtailed cultural activity, however, and there have been many perennial supporters of live events who have expressed the opinion that such gatherings should not be happening during a pandemic. Opinion is on one side, while the law places the limits. Also, many more elderly regular attendees have decided that now is the time to lock up and stay in. Individuals have made their own choices.

And now, on the day that bars and restaurants can open until ten o’clock in the evening and when cultural venues can admit seventy-five per cent of their capacity, it was under the previous, more severe restrictions that saw concerts on Friday evening, Saturday lunchtime and evening and Sunday lunchtime in Alfas del Pi and Alicante.

On Friday in Alfas del Pi, Antonio Garcia Egea and Fernando Espi joined as Duo Arbos to play a works from the repertoire of violin and guitar. This was the kind of programme one does not encounter often. It started conventionally with Spanish Dance no5 by Granados, but Carlo Domeniconi’s Sonatina Mexicana has probably not figured often on concert programmes in the last year. It has probably never been followed by Ravi Shankar’s El Alba Encantada, and the microtones of Indian music have probably never before led into Paganini’s Cantabile! Astor Piazzolla’s Historia del Tango, Bourdel 1900 and Café 1930 followed by Libertango was conventional in comparison, as perhaps was Pablo Sarasate’s Playera Romanza Andaluza, despite the understated but stratospheric virtuosity of the ending of the violin part. We finished the evening with Fernandon Espi’s own Impromptu and we were particularly grateful in these times to be taken by the performers on such a varied journey.

On Saturday lunchtime the orchestra at ADDA (Auditori de la Diputacion de Alicante) marked fifty years since the death of Igor Stravinsky with a breath-taking performance of Petroushka. Yes, it’s a work that the majority of the audience had hear many, many times, but it remains a work that is fresh with every new exposure and particularly so in this reading by Josep Vicent, whose reading of this music is faultless. The colours were always vivid, the scenes clear and beautifully depicted in this work that paints with sound. We also heard a superb reading of the Elgar Cello Concerto by Damian Martinez and then had encores of the Valse Triste of Sibelius and, and true to the form of current concerts, a short piece of Piazzolla, Oblivion, with the leader’s violin as soloist.

Then on Saturday evening, back in Alfas del Pi Duo Fortecello, the cello and piano of Anna Mikulska and Philippe Argenty, gave the first of their two concerts. This one featured works by Chopin, Nocturne opus 9, Cello sonata and Polonaise Brillante coupled with Piazzolla (yet again!) in the form of the Triptyque "la Trilogie de l'Ange" and finally the Danse Macabre of Saint-Saens. We only just made the curfew…

Then on Sunday, Duo Fortecello presented their second programme in Albir. While their first programme was the epitome of the conventional, the second was as opposite as it is possible to be. They opened with Joaquin Nin’s Seguida Española and followed with what proved to be a rare gem. Gaspar Cassado wrote a famous sonata for cello and piano based on old Spanish tunes, but this Sonata en la menor, though from the same year, 1925, is quite different in character. Exactly how many times this work has been performed in Spain cannot be assessed, but it is certainly not many times. And it may have been performed elsewhere even less. The work itself is superb and deserves to be much more widely heard, especially when it is compared to other works that form the basis of the repertoire for cello and piano. Any music lover will find great reward in searching out this work and hearing it performed. It has to be said that the fourth movement, Paso Doble, does not live up to the quality of the first three, but the criticism is minor. How many composers, after all, were capable of writing finales that lived up to their preceding movements?

Anna and Philippe continued with a Flamenco solo for cello by Rogelio Huguet y Tagell and then Andaluza by Granados. Manuel de Falla’s Siete Canciones Populares Españolas is music of genius and Gaspar Cassado’s Requiebros, though derivative, is a superb way to finish any concert. And so the duo had given a musical tour of Spain, visiting most regions and sampling its musical soul. Superb. And what a relief from current preoccupations!