ENIZ assis
Iberia
(orchestrated by Peter Breiner)
Moscow Symphony Orchestra * Igor GolovschinIsaac 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,
2except 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
8.553023Moscow 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 48.553023
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
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8.553023
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