Costa Blanca Arts Update - Mariozzi-Mariozzi-Rucli in Brahms, Beethoven and Rota and Palomares-Espi in Musica Iberoamericano

Live music in December 2020 is probably not the commonest of commodities wherever you live. In our corner of south-east Spain, we have some. In normal times, whatever that phrase might now mean, there would be at least the opportunity of attending two or three concerts a week in this area, but our new normal here has for several months changed the situation. Whether it is this new scarcity, this new normal, or indeed whether it is simply the quality of what we hear, I have no idea, but I can record without hesitation that everything now sounds more vivid, more committed and more beautiful. And so it was for the two chamber music events presented by Alfas del Pi’s Classical Music Society this weekend.

On Saturday 12 December in Casa Cultura, the society hosted a piano trio with what looked like at first glance a fairly standard program. The trio comprised the clarinet of Vicenzo Mariozzi, the cello of Francisco Mariozzi and the piano of Andrea Rucli. This was in fact the fourth concert of the trio’s mini tour with the same program and, if the other three venues had provided rehearsal time, then this fourth concert’s perfection might just have another explanation apart from the obvious and sustained virtuosity of the musicians.

We began with the Brahms trio opus114. Its gentle, almost flickering lines assemble to present a mind in turmoil. The phrases may be short, sometimes very short, but the statements are long and sometimes convoluted. But eventually this is direct music, despite its almost constant asides, whose surface a listener can enjoy at an aural glance. But there is much more here only just below the gloss. There is the aftermath of depression, an obvious, but, one feels, an unfulfilled desire to reflect on a past that has some powerful memories. There is nostalgia alongside fear of the future and the unknown. The music seems to reek of regret. Its style and hand are both utterly assured, but the composer is suffering new personal doubt, so we are presented with a contradictory and compelling mix of late Brahms, personal doubt expressed via assured technique, intangible feelings precisely described. It was a picture that Vicenzo Mariozzi, Francisco Mariozzi and Andrea Rucli conveyed via a remarkable skill of understatement.

In retrospect the next two works on the program formed a similar pair, an unexpectedly similar pair in that they seem to share an unusual conceptual framework. Beethoven was a young man when he wrote his opus 11 trio, the Gassenhauer. He wanted to show off. He wanted to make his mark on the city‘s life, future earnings being the goal. He thus wrote a serious trio that showed off his melodic, conceptual and compositional gift. But crucially he adopted a contemporary earworm for the main theme of the finale. It was a tune that everyone was whistling around the town. In Beethoven’s hands, it became a set of variations where the main variable is rhythm. This trivial little idea then becomes something grand, even grandiose at times, despite its humble origins. It was rather what Beethoven himself wanted to do in his own life.

The final piece in this program was the trio by Nino Rota. The work’s first two movements are both highly melodic and very rhythmic, but the musical language is couched in a style that can only be described as astringent neoclassicism. This may not be Hindemith, nor Stravinsky, but it is music with a hard, sometimes spiky surface. The finale, however, is like a scoop of ice cream on a crumbly biscuit, an almost hackneyed ditty that sits somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Cops. It’s a moment that reminds us not to take anything too seriously, except, perhaps, a sideways surreal and thus revealing view of life. Beethoven chose a silly ditty to self-aggrandise, whereas Rota seems to make fun of the whole process until, however, one realizes how beautifully written and constructed is the entire work. And the fact that this commentary deals almost exclusively with the impressions delivered by the pieces is testimony to the perfection that Vicenzo Mariozzi, Francisco Mariozzi and Andrea Rucli brought to the playing.

And then, on Sunday lunchtime Alfas del Pi Music Society presented a violin and guitar duo in Albir. It’s a combination and a concert we have heard before and hopefully we will hear again. The society’s vice-president, virtuoso violinist Joaquín Palomares renewed his performing partnership with guitarist Fernando Espí in a program they titled Música Iboamericana. In theory, these might be viewed as lighter pieces, an assemblage to pass a pleasant hour on a clear and sunny December day by the sea.

But the understanding between these two virtuoso musicians renders everything they play not only elegant but also exciting and ultimately moving. The program was the Serenata by Malats, the Brazilian Dances of Machado, a Milonga by Tavolaro, Amasia by Boutros, three of Manuel de Falla’s Popular Songs and two movements from The Story of the Tango by Piazzolla. The music went from bossa nova to tango, from Europe to South America, from folk music to dancehall, a journey which, when contrasted with the trio of the previous evening, really did illustrate how far music can transport an audience and the different places it can take us.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Going down with a bang - Amsterdam Percussion Group in Altea

Percussion ensembles often try to raise the macho to an art form. Loudness and aggression often predominate, usually to the detriment of music. Obvious exceptions would be any Korean samulnori ensemble, where the macho is utterly enshrined, Gary Burton at his best, anything involving Steve Reich and, in the past, occasionally, Kodo. But often they seemed intent on beating the guts out of their Japanese temple drums. 

Now I must add the Amsterdam Percussion Group to the list of subtler performers, their concert in Palau Altea proving to be a complete joy. Altea-born Josep Vicent fronts the group. For six years he was a percussionist with one of the world’s greatest orchestras, the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam, and is now also a superb conductor in his own right. Anyone who attended his reading of Bernstein’s West Side Story Suite with the World Orchestra of Jeunesse Musicales in Villajoyosa and La Nucia earlier this year will testify to that. 

But Josep Vicent is also a stunningly accomplished performer and percussionist. Surely he is destined for significant international recognition. The Amsterdam Percussion Group varied from three to six players. The three core members are all percussionists and, in Palau Altea, their battery of instruments was occasionally augmented by cello, guitar and bass guitar. 

The musical style is minimalist, the debt to Steve Reich explicit, but there was Gary Burton there as well in the jazz-style four mallet vibraphone techniques. Fundamental to Steve Reich’s musical personality was the idea of performance above recording and, surely, this philosophy was fundamental to everything offered by Josep Vicent’s group. 

They started with what proved to be a weakness, apparently improvising a climactic modal interchange over a musique concrète tape. In the 1960s I might have been impressed. The cello piece that followed eventually became vibraphone and bass guitar, and again it left a lot to be desired in the inspiration box.  

Then things came to life. The three percussionists played four tuned drums, offering a piece reminiscent of the first part of Steve Reich’s Drumming. It was superbly done, loud and musical, its rhythms complex yet immediately memorable. 

Quiet then intervened in the form of a Piazzolla tango played by a quintet, again with vibes and marimba. This was followed by one of the evening’s true high points, a piece called Black Page by Frank Zappa. The first section’s difficult chromatic cello led on to a ferocious and supremely skilful unison doubling of Josep Vicent’s drums and the marimba of Mike Schaperclaus, before the piece made its minimal point in vast proportions. 

The evening’s high point came next. It was the quietest piece of the night, played by the three percussionists, Josep, Mike and Arie de Boer, seated like kids at a party on the edge of the stage. Before them were three square bits of smooth plywood, each mounted on what appeared to be a couple of off cuts of two-by-one, amplified. With forehand and backhand strokes, finger prods, karate chops, slaps and taps, the three of them offered Table Music by Thierry de Mey, a percussive ballet for six hands. 

A sextet reminiscent of Gary Burton’s early jazz followed and then a piece of pure Africa, a fast, explosive piece of Burundian drumming. A flamenco-style sextet with guitar completed the performance, which was greeted with a universal standing ovation, and deservedly so. If you missed this one, there’s always the next time. They were exciting, subtle and musical, as well as loud. Josep Vicent will be back. He’s from Altea, after all.

Cultured Tangos

It may be that in musical retrospect, from a luxury of twenty-twenty critical hindsight, that Astor Piazzolla will be seen as having done in the twentieth century for the tango what Frederick Chopin did in the nineteenth for the waltz. It is perhaps already an accepted position. 

With the waltz, Chopin took an established popular form and stretched its boundaries so that what an audience might have expected to be a little ditty was recast to express heroism, sensuality, pride or even occasional doubt. The little dance tune then, in Chopin’s slender hands, became an elegant art form, highly expressive, utterly Romantic in its ability to convey human emotion. 

The tango represents an apparently different proposition. Already sensuous by definition, there are elements of the romantic towards which the tango need not aspire. If Romanticism placed individual emotional responses upon the pedestal of artistic expression, by the time the tango aspired to truly international currency in the twentieth century, there was no longer any need to worry about an artist’s right to make a personal statement. 

With the rise of serialism, neo-classicism and, later, minimalism, artistic mores were already, perhaps, heading in the opposite direction, towards a new espousal of rigour and structure. Emotion worn on the cuffs, like concepts plucked from the back of a matchbox, seemed to dominate cultural activities in the latter part of the century whilst, at the same time, Althusser and Derrida, allied with the populism of mass culture, seemed to suggest that there were no new statements, let alone discoveries, to be made. A spectral free-for-all ruled, where distinctions of quality were suddenly both particularistic and individual to the point of exclusion. (This, of course, is necessarily a paradox for people promoting a populist pop culture, since they aspire to mass consumption of a single artistic vision, a statement that by definition cannot be worth more than any other – even randomly selected statement. As a result, those who tend to deny a critic’s right to make value judgments must themselves assume that such judgments are perfectly valid in the marketplace. It’s a contradictory position, but an essential one for purveyors of pop, since they must continue to describe the form as popular, despite the fact that the vast majority of its products prove themselves to be anything but.) 

Post-modernists thus hailed the soap opera alongside Shakespeare, a logic that renders a Coca Cola advertisement the greatest film ever made by virtue of its viewer numbers. And then there was Piazzolla, an enigma par excellence. On the one hand Astor Piazzolla is the quintessential mid-twentieth century composer. Classically trained, a pupil of Alberto Ginastera and Nadia Boulanger, and inspired by the commercial and folk music of his own country, he could have slotted alongside Villa Lobos, Ponce, or even Martinu or Copeland as a contributor to the century’s neo-classical-folk music paradigm. 

But what he did was quite different. He devoted his compositional energies to recreating and reinventing a popular idiom that was thoroughly specific to his own country, Argentina. The form, of course, was the tango. What is more, Astor Piazzolla concentrated on performance via his own ensembles and he achieved considerable success, albeit local until near the end of his life, over a career that spanned fifty years. But he expressed himself on the bandoneon, a squeezebox that lends itself to staccato, slapping attack, an instrument not peculiar to Argentina, but perhaps only well known to Argentinians. He died in 1992, his Romantic heroism national at best. 

It was in the early 1990s that arrangements of Piazzolla’s music began to appear on “classical” programmes. By the time a figure as august as Daniel Barenboim recorded his Tangos Among Friends, Mi Buenos Aires Querido, in 1995, they were already becoming established in the repertoire. I personally have heard performances of Piazzolla’s music for full orchestra, string orchestra, chamber orchestra, various formats of chamber ensemble, piano trio, solo piano, solo harp, flute and guitar, guitar solo, violin and piano, string quartet, string trio and, of course, bandoneon. But it is surely the chamber group that best fits this music. 

There is always a toughness to its apparent sensuality that tends to be overstated by the large numbers of a full orchestra. Lack of volume, on the other hand, tends to stress the saccharine. And if you want to find an exquisite match between the music’s toughness and sensuality, its durability versus its novelty, there is surely no better experience than that provided by Camerata Virtuosi, a septet led by violinist Joaquin Palomares and featuring saxophonist Claude Delangle. Their recording of Piazzolla’s music features Joaquin Palomares’ superb arrangements that capture the music’s directness and beauty while preserving its toughness. 

A Camerata Virtuosi performance in the Auditori de la Mediterrània, La Nucia in February 2008 featured all the pieces included in their recording of Piazzolla’s music. The group performed all four of the Seasons as a sextet with two violins, viola, cello, bass and piano. These pieces offer Joaquin Palomares a perfect vehicle to display his virtuoso violin playing which communicates the music’s line whilst at the same time decorates with highly effective jazz-like riffs. The rest of the pieces were performed by a septet in which Claude Delangle’s perfect soprano saxophone bent and teased its way through lambent legato lines.

It was playing of the highest quality. As on the recording, particularly successful were Oblivion and Milonga del Angel. Oblivion is the quintessential Piazzolla, a popular sing-along for the manic depressive perhaps, and not therefore a rarity. But the simplicity and understatement of the piece always works beautifully, even when played twice in the same concert, as in La Nucia. Milonga del Angel is a different kind of piece. Though superficially similar to Oblivion, it manages in its six minutes to develop through its binary form, so that different movements create different moods within the same material. A true highlight. Joaquin Palomares’ violin playing was, as always, more than elegant throughout and by the end the audience had experienced again the genius of Piazzolla courtesy of Palomares’ superb arrangements. Great music needs great interpreters, and Piazzolla’s has surely found one in Joaquin Palomares.