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ENIZ assis Iberia (orchestrated by Peter Breiner) Moscow Symphony Orchestra * Igor Golovschin Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) Iberia (orchestrated by Peter Breiner) Isaac Albéniz enjoyed a double career, winning an international reputation as a virtuoso pianist and doing much to establish Spanish music in a form acceptable at home and abroad. He was born in 1860 at Camprodén in the province of Gerora, the son of a customs official of Basque origin and a mother from Catalonia, He began his study of the piano at the age of three in Barcelona and apparently appeared at a charity concert the following year, playing duets with his sister Clementina, seven years his senior and allegedly his first teacher. The family moved to Madrid in 1868 and Albéniz. was able to study there at the Escuela Nacional de Misica y Declamacién, the forerunner of the Madrid Conservatory. Colourful legends, inspired by Albéniz himself, include stories of how he ran away from home to earn a living as a pianist, playing in a number of Spanish cities, and how later he stowed away on a ship to America, where he led an adventurous life as a peripatetic pianist. All these tales have been largely discounted by recent research (Walter A. Clark: Isaac Albéniz: Portrait of a Romantic, Oxford, 1999, and the same writer's succinct article in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Band I, Kassel, 1999). Tours in Spain seem to have been cartied out under his father’s guidance and his visit to Cuba and Puerto Rico took place when his father was appointed to a position in Havana. In 1876 he certainly enrolled in the Leipzig Conservatory, but soon left, perhaps hampered there by a lack of German, An award from King Alfonso XiI allowed him to enter the Brussels Conservatoire in the autumn of the same year. His studies continued there until 1879 and fellow-students included the viol and conductor Enrique Arbés, one of the orchestrators of parts of the suite Iberia. Albéniz travelled to Budapest where he might have expected to meet Liszt, but no such meeting could have taken place and stories of lessons from Liszt appear to have been false. There followed further journeys to Cuba and 8.553023 Puerto Rico and a period in Spain when he turned his attention to the composition and performance of zarzuelas, a popular Spanish dramatic form in which dialogue is interspersed with music and song. In 1883 Albéniz moved to Barcelona once more, now taking lessons from Felipe Pedrell, an influential figure in the creation of a broadly Spanish school of composition, Any instruction he received seems to have been informal but set the pattern for much of his future writing. After a return to Madrid and further years of teaching, composition and performance, success in the concert hall in Paris and London persuaded him to settle in the latter city. There Henry Lowenfeld, a businessman, offered him a steady income and financial provision for himself and his family, for his concert activities, and for further work for the theatre, A later meeting with Francis Burdett Money-Coutts, a member of the banking family whose interests were more literary than financial, led to the latter taking over these obligations with an agreement that brought continued subsidy and a chance to collaborate in other stage . The understanding with Money-Coutts, which might have seemed to some inappropriate, allowed Albéniz to concentrate on composition rather than performance and did not confine him t0 London or, indeed, to one writer. In 1893 he moved to Paris, where he studied orchestration with Paul Dukas and counterpoint with Vincent d’Indy and enjoyed social contact with leading musicians of their circle. During the 1890s Albéniz turned his attention to the theatre again, writing zarzuelas for performance in Spain and completing his opera Henry Clifford, with a libretto by Money-Coutts, a work that was suecessfully staged in Barcelona in 1895 in Italian translation. This was followed in 1896 by the two-act opera Pepita Jiménez, again based on a libretto by his patron. His, intended trilogy on libretti derived by Money-Coutts from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur was not completed, 2 except for the first work, Merlin, which was not staged in the composer's lifetime. He divided the later years af his life, a period of deteriorating health, between Paris, Barcelona and Nice, years which saw the composition of Iberia. The first book of the piano suite /beria, 12 Nouvelles impressions en quatre cahiers (Twelve New Impressions in Four Books) was published in 1905 and dedicated to the widow of his friend, the composer Emest Chausson, whose death in 1899 in a bicycle accident he had found particularly distressing. The first piece, Evocacién, is gently evocative, identifiably Spanish yet recognisably in the spirit of French music of, the period. Marked Allegretto espressivo, its first them= is set over a syncopated accompaniment and leads to a secondary theme of clearer Spanish connotation. El Puerto takes its name from El Puerto de Santa Marfa, a fishing-port near Cédiz. It is represented by a characteristic Spanish dance, with allusions to the technique of the guitar. The first book ends with Fére- Dieu @ Séville, generally given in later editions as El Corpus en Sevilla, inspired by the Corpus Christi celebrations in Seville. The procession is heard approaching, with its band and the cries of its penitents, before it passes, leaving the street deserted, to the sound of distant church bells. Albéniz completed the second book of Iberia in 1896 and dedicated it to the pianist Blanche Selve. Rondefia suggests in its title the music of Ronda, general allusion, it may be supposed, to that region of south-western Spain Its characteristic alternating rhythms relax into a gentler secondary theme, bot elements to return in recapitulation. Almeria, evoking a town on the south-eastern coast of Spain, has a similar typical asymmetry of rhythm, with expressively worked cross-thythms in its secondary theme. This is followed by Triana, suggesting the gypsy district of Seville and its flamenco traditions. The third book was completed towards the end of 1896 and dedicated to Marguerite Hasselmans, although 3 two of the pieces were originally intended for the Catalan pianist Joaquim Malats, whose performances particularly pleased the composer. EI Albaicin, the gypsy quarter of Granada, is depicted in a movement marked Allegro assai, ma melancolico which brings its own dynamic climax. £! Polo, described as a dance and song from Andalusia, is, in its title at least, an example of flamenco, here preserving a typical air of melancholy, suggested in the initial instruction sanglotant (sobbing). Lavapiés is a district of Madrid that takes its name from the ritual washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday. The piece has something of the habanera about it in its depiction of street life in a poorer quarter of the city. Iberia ends with three pieces written in 1907 and 1908. The set was dedicated to Madame Pierre Lalo, daughter-in-law of the composer Edouard Lalo, Mélaga inevitably recalls the malaguefta and relaxes into a secondary theme, all to be developed and recapitulated, following the abridged version of sonata form used in so many of these movements. It is followed by Jerez, the last of the pieces to be written, in similar form, with a melancholy first theme, interrupted by suggestions of guitar chords. The last piece, Eritama takes its name from the Venta Eritafia, an inn in Seville, where flamenco was often heard. It was not originally intended to end the suite, but to come second, to be followed by a projected L’Albuféra, depicting Valencia in a jota valenciana. This last was never written and Eritaiia took its place, providing a relatively light-hearted ending to a suite which represents a summary and the culmination of the achievement of Albéniz in Spanish music, It should be added that Zberia cries out for orchestration. Nine of the pieces were orchestrated by Arbés and enjoyed success in the concert hall in thi form. The gifted Slovak-born Peter Breiner now offers a colourful orchestrated version of the whole work. Keith Anderson 8.553023 Moscow Symphony Orchestra Established in 1989, the Moscow Symphony Orchestra includes prize-winners and laureates of Russian and international music competitions and graduates of conservatories in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev who have played under such conductors as Svetlanov, Rozhdestvensky, Mravinsky and Ozawa, throughout the world. In addition to its extensive concert programmes, the orchestra has been recognized for its outstanding recordings for Marco Polo, including the first-ever survey of Malipiero’s symphonies, symphonic music of Guatemala, the complete symphonies of Charles Tournemire and music by Scriabin, Glazunov, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Nikolay ‘Teherepnin, It has also embarked on a survey of classic film scores ftom Hollywood’s golden age. The orchestra toured in 1991 to Finland and to England, where collaboration with a well known rock band demonstrated readiness for experimentation. A British and Japanese commission brought a series of twelve television programmes for international distribution, Igor Golovschin ‘The Russian conductor Igor Goloyschin was born in 1956 and entered the piano class of the Special Music School ined the class of Kyril Kondrashin at the Moscow Conservatory and in 1981 joined the Irkutsk Symphony Orchestra, winning the Herbert von Karajan Conductors’ Competition in the following year, followed, in 1984, by victory in the Moscow National Conductors’ competition. Five years later he was invited to join the former USSR State Symphony Orchestra, where he was assistant to Yevgeny Svetlanov until the latter's death in 1998, 8.553023 4 8.553023 Iberia ALBENIZ NAXOS Peter Breiner’s orchestration perfectly captures the colours of the twelve pieces written by Albéniz for his own instrument, the piano. In orchestral dress Iberia offers a vivid picture of Spain in all its variety. Tsage ALBENIZ (1860-1909) Iberia (orchestrated by Peter Breiner) Book I Evocacién El Puerto El Corpus en Sevilla Book II Rondefia Almeria ‘Triana Book IT El Albaicin EI Polo Lavapiés Book IV Malaga Jerez Eritafia Moscow Symphony Orchestra + Igor Goloyschin Recorded in Mosfilm Studio, Moscow in March, 1996 Produced by: BETTA INC. + Engineers: Edvard Shakhnazarian & Vitaly Ivanov Cover Photo: Gaudi's Park Guell, Barcelona by Jeremy Horner/Hlutchison Picture Library AB. Ch} DDD 8.553023 Pre Tin Worl = PI P| i=) 5 B 5 z 6 iy 5 Naor SOXVN Big] :ZINADTV ETOESS'S

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