Exceptional Music Concerts

Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2008-11-24T13:37:00.000-08:00

The Maestro and his First Class 'Students'
29th October, 2008 - 6.30 pm - Steinway Hall, London.

Maestro Alberto Portugheis - live sketch, 2008 - by Ronald Stein

Alberto Portugheis is a lucky Maestro – even, an extremely lucky one – and by Jove! He deserves fully his providential good fortune. He is an extraordinary human being, totally devoted to his chosen field – Music, and chosen instrument – the Piano.

His performance career has resulted in several sought-after recordings, including besides the Khachaturian Piano Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra, such rarities as Rossini’s piano works.

Founder of the Iberian & Latin American Music Society (ILAMS) and its Chairman, Founder and Artistic Director of the Dorothea Law Piano Centre, Vice-Chairman of the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe, Vice-President of the European Piano Teachers’ Association … enough? For ordinary mortals, I would say, more than enough, but not for Maestro Portugheis – he is also, and wait for this, Vice-Chairman of the International Society for the Study of … Tension in Performance, not only in Music, but also Theatre and Dance!

Still, all the above activities that may floor someone half his age, is not enough for the Maestro, who also manifests young Goethe’s wanderlust – born and bred in La Plata, Argentina, of Russian and Rumanian parentage, now based in London, the Maestro has appeared in Canada, the USA, France, Hungary, Greece, Switzerland, Cyprus, Serbia, Nigeria … and won’t stand still – he tirelessly raises funds for the education of very poor children of the AmaZon Art charity founded by a virtuoso young Brazilian cellist, Diego Carneiro.

To top it all, Maestro Alberto Portugheis is also writing a book on the … language of Peace. Any wonder then that he has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize?

Cultured and compassionate, the Maestro is a gentle soul, always with a smile, an unassuming human being – Like Jesus washing the desert-worn feet of his disciples, it is rather moving to witness Maestro Portugheis sitting next to his piano students as a page-turner … turning the pages of their musical scores with a profound paternal affection.

And what was the Maestro’s extreme luck I was referring to?

The fact that four of his piano “students” he presented in a concert – Clare Jones, Katalin Csillagh, Jovanni de Pedro, Blagoy Filipov – are already technically speaking masters of the keyboard – each a concert pianist of virtuosic proportions – any one of them alone would bring honor to a teacher and their national cultures, let alone an incredible … Four of them at once, come here to London to attend three days of Masterclasses with the Maestro!

Clare Jones played quietly but firmly Schubert’s Sonata in A Minor (D.784) like Beethovenian Variations, enlightening me to the possibility that Schubert’s said work may indeed have been inspired at a deeper level by Beethoven’s variations … Ms Jones also manifested the right amount of zartlichkeit for a Schubert composition.

Katalin Csillagh, a Hungarian virtuoso, played Beethoven’s Sonata in F Sharp (Op. 78) with a Bach-like nobility, leaving no doubt whatsoever about Beethoven’s own study of Bach’s Counterpoint.

While the rich display of Beethoven’s Bach-like quality in itself was quite an achievement by Katalin Csillagh, I wished she could also simultaneously not lose occasionally the traditional passionate Beethovenian delight in musical dialectical contrasts, battles with exhausting and exhaustive contradictions rising into feisty crescendos. Of course I would not know if Maestro Portugheis’ gentleness had dampened down Miss Csillagh’s Beethovenian ardour.

Jovanni De Pedro on the other hand, had all the ardour, in fact in double and treble dosage … perfectly suited to Ginastera’s brash Sonata No. 1 (Op. 22) – an odd piece this – it begins with a harsh allegro marcato with referential melodies and rhythms all over the place – New Orleans Jazz, Duke Ellington, Carmen Jones (Ginastera lived in the USA for two years in 1945, and may have seen a revival of the original 1943 Broadway production) and, most of all, Aram Khachaturian … the latter’s Violin Concerto and Toccata for Piano providing Ginastera with a wealth of inspiration. Most originally though, the Right and the Left hands are used equivalently, as musical mirror reflections of one another.

The Second movement, in presto misterioso sounded like music for a ghost-film, with a Hollywood car-chase wrapped in a nightmare. The piano-playing hands though return to their conventional function, the Left being the base-line holder, the accompaniment to the melodic Right. Moreover, there is more passion here than in the next movement misnamed as adagio molto appassionato, which curiously had more 'mystery' in it than the previous movement supposed to be imbibed in misterioso – odd, very odd – either Ginastera had got it wrong – great people too can get it frequently wrong (including Popes!) – Or his interpreter Jovanni de Pedro could not deliver the composer’s dynamic markings – unlikely the latter, because Jovanni displays virtuosic musical grasp. It must therefore be Ginastera’s own emotional chaos.

What is remarkable, once again, was the functional use of the hands – now, back to the case of the first movement, where the Right and the Left were treated equilaterally, but in this movement with a subtle nuance – they no more reflect one another, but rather stay separate and independent, doing their own thing.

The last movement, ruvido ed ostinato is Khachaturian’s Toccata for Piano gone mad, and with exciting arpeggios truly ostinato! Jazz is forgotten, unless one insists that Khachaturian was being Stravinsky-like jazzy breathing fresh air into the close atmosphere during the Stalinist tyranny over the Soviet Arts.

Last but not least, Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures from (sic! I think at) an Exhibition (1874) is the kind of all-time masterpiece no modernist composer of any rank can do without – it has probably influenced everybody who is anybody in music. Endlessly transcribed for even a large orchestra (first by the French Maurice Ravel of the Bolero fame, in 1922), for Organ by Hansjörg Albrecht, there is a Swiss Jazz-band version by Mats-up, even a Rock-version by ELP = Emerson Lake & Palmers (who, interestingly, had also adapted the 4th movement of Ginastera’s first Piano Concerto and recorded it on an album Brain Salad Surgery in 1973 under the title Toccata). But it is good to hear Mussorgsky’s Pictures in its original conception as a piano solo with dense orchestral textures.

The Bulgarian Blagoy Filipov is undoubtedly a concert pianist of great virtuosic potential, but alas, alack, he did himself a great disservice by playing it from the score, rather than by-heart (pun intended). If there ever was a solo piece in the history of ‘western’ music that demands absolutely, the absolute use of one’s musical memory, it is this!

Mussorgsky’s piece, as good as a symphonic poem, is a peak of what I call visual narrative music (my term – instead of the commonly used, and I think silly term “program-music”) – the performer must inwardly soul-fully visualize practically every note, and it is simply humanly impossible to do so while reading the score during a concert performance. I can categorically refute any excuses for not doing so. I think Maestro Portugheis should have insisted on it being so.

The damage done to the performer was obvious from the very first few bars played too student-like, as if trying to get the notes right – architecturally constructed on the principle of the leitmotif later identified with Wagner’s oeuvre, Mussorgsky delineates I think a complex character of a visitor seeing these extraordinary paintings from an old castle (il vecchio castello) to the musically overpowering gate of the Bohatyrs of Kiev (La Porte des Bohatyrs de Kiev) – and you better not mess with a shaven-headed Ukrainian Khokhol-Cossack … 'Bohatyr' is a word of Persian origin, passed into the Ukrainian language via the Turkish, meaning a strong man, hence a hero!

Mussorgsky had created his Suite of piano pieces as a monument to a Jewish friend of his, Victor Hartmann, an architect whose Exhibition of about 400 designs – drawings, sketches and watercolours Mussorgsky had seen, before Hartmann died in 1873.

It took Mussorgsky almost a year to compose his masterpiece of new modernist sound, ironically by going back to the roots of the Russian language and folklore – he intended each piece to be a subjective musical emotional response – his own really! – to one of Hartmann’s paintings. Mussorgsky selected ten of them, then lined them up all on a 'Gallery' wall he imagined … himself being the sole Visitor walking about (Promenading) in the Gallery – what an inventive imagination of sheer creative genius!

And how daring politically, and in profound compassionate humanity – Mussorgsky belonged to Russia’s landed gentry, who were anti-Semitic, anti-Ukrainian, anti-Polish … anti-everythig really, and Mussorgsky chose a bosom friend (Hartmann) who was both Jewish and Ukrainian/Polish, and glorified them all in an extraordinary innovative sound-world which was profoundly … Russian, deeply rooted in his own people’s folklore. Thank god the Tsar’s censors (as all censors in political dictatorships) were too stupid to understand Mussorgsky’s humanitarian message of non-racist brotherhood to deport him to Siberia – they did not need to do him any harm either, as Mussorgsky drank himself to an early grave (*).

Blagoy Filipov’s score-ridden Promenade was the ambulation of a bore, visiting the exhibition like a dumb American tourist, looking at works of art through his home-made video-lens.

Filipov’s interpretative inadequacies had one stunning unintended consequence – it brought home and enlightened hitherto an un-acknowledged aspect of Mussorgsky’s musical genius.

What is hitherto regarded (in musicology) as the visitor’s simple leitmotif – a musical sticky tape bonding the different musical events (=pictures/paintings) together – a “melody repeated as an interlude between many of the paintings” as one ignoramus critic puts it, is in fact I think a complex, musically highly richly textured characterization in different keys and variations throughout, as profoundly individualized as in a Shakespeare play …

The Exhibition-Visitor’s deceptively tuneful melody that begins the piece with almost a childish nursery-rhyme ring to it, is in fact immediately and instantly variegated by a range of several different rhythms, and is then developed and enriched with extraordinary complexities right to the end of the piece.

This musically factual observation allows me to daresay that musicologists have got it all wrong – the ‘pictures’ are more of a side-show – precisely the reverse of what is understood hitherto – contributing to the central focal evolution of the Visitor’s dramatic characterization (as in a good play), and his emotive reactions to the paintings musically magnificently delineated throughout. The extraordinary range and variety of the pictures are there only to enhance Mussorgsky/Visitor’s (by proxy the Listener’s) experience of them – the latter’s emotional evolutionary entanglement with the pictures, Mussorgsky pictures (again, pun intended) before your very mind’s eyes …

I would go further and insist that Mussorgsky’s undoubtedly autobiographical Visitor to my mind is consciously a Portrait drawn of himself by himself as a pictorial “Self-portrait” par excellence.

There is a frightening musical feast of dramatic, wild and almost barbaric characterizations right at the end of the piece (at the awe-inspiring Gate of the Cossack Heroes – the Bohatyrs of Kiev);

The Visitor having just seen the scene of La cabane sur des pattes de poule (= The Hut on the paws of a Hen, a funny mad title this, thought to refer to Baba-Yaga, a fairy tale witch who crunches ... children’s bones and lives in a shed on … chicken legs!) – musically a kind of Beethoven scherzo evolving into … Tchaikovsky sugar-plum fairies, while echoing an earlier picture of an erotic Ballet des poussins dans leurs coques (=Chicks in their cocks! Surely, it must be the other way around … but perhaps Mussorgsky did not wish to blatantly scandalize the gay Russian aristocrats, misleading the critics into thinking that it merely means “un-hatched chicks”, still the dogma in musicology), musically unrelated to what follows but contrasting it dialectically, the ambulating Promenade/Visitor journeys through an extraordinary spiritual range of concentrated musical emotions ~ there is nothing like it in music ~ at the awesome Gates of Kiev, from the timid, when he can hardly tiptoe around, to dissonant chords and solemn heavy arpeggios in largo – a remarkable musical feat this – recovering his self-confidence, and finally rushing away hurriedly as a changed man – St Paul’s phenomenal conversion (epiphany) on the road to Damascus!

The separate identities of the ‘pictures’ are erroneously exaggerated in critical studies of Mussorgsky. Musically speaking, the whole thing is not a linear arrangement of separate pictures (themes) hanging on the walls of an Exhibition Hall, but a single tapestry of a single composition – I suggest the Promenade-theme – with extraordinary scenes – its variations – taking place in different locations but somehow deeply connected.

Thus, for example, the Bydlo painting (a Polish word meaning a heavy farm-cart, with wooden wheels, drawn by two oxen through the mud-mired fields of Northern Europe), musically speaking is a solemn variation on the lighter theme of the Promenade, as much as Samuil Goldenberg and Schmuyle is – impossible not to think of a Chagall-painting of stetl-jews, Goldenberg wealthy, and Schmuyle very poor, the first residing in London’s Edgware, the other in Manor House – while the Limoges market presents a complex alloy of variations on both the Promenade and the Ballet des poussins.

Ironically, I am of course most grateful for these path-breaking and vital musicological insights to Blagoy Filipov’s score-playing I would not condone!

(*) My instinct suggests to me – perhaps influenced sub-consciously by his first name Modest being the same as Tchaikovsky’s older brother’s name who was quite a liberated homosexual – that Mussorgsky (1839-1881) perhaps was gay himself and could not cope with its hypocritical persecution by the Russian-Prussian ... French-speaking ruling elite practicing it behind closed doors, while marrying women for Christian cover!! The great Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) himself was a perpetrator precisely of this kind of behaviour, against all advice to the contrary from his upfront brother and the latter’s aristocratic gay gang. Tchaikovsky was eventually forced into a suicide by the Tsar for seducing a young princeling – although the subject is still controversial among the experts of his biography.

*

I am deeply grateful to Ronald Stein, Advertising Consultant, for letting me publish exclusively and as a first on the World-wide Net his live-sketch of Maestro Portugheis above.

Ronald Stein has a magnificent collection of such sketches of world-class musicians drawn live over the years, during their concert performances. I hope he publishes them soon as an Art-Book with snippets of his memories attached to them individually.

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Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2008-06-22T18:19:00.000-07:00

A Promise of Greatness

Arturo Serna & Ana Laura Manero - Duo Teresa Carreno

The Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela - London

Bolivar Hall, 29th May 2008, 7.30 pm.

Arturo Serna (Cello) and Ana Laura Manero (Piano) are excellently trained young Venezuelan musicians, who have come together to form Duo Teresa Carreňo, when in fact each possesses all the merits to carve up a great Solo career. Their coming together however, is an intelligent move as both shall need one another to mature as great artists in an exceedingly mercantile (and mercenary) world of music. The success of the Bolivarian Revolution creatively re-invented by the hugely popular President Hugo Chavez is the sole guarantee of the mass Renaissance of all of the Venezuelan Arts and crafts.

What is commendable about this Duo is the innovative intelligence of their repertoire, playing classical South American and Spanish works Eurocentric musicians would ignore (the latter betraying their own lamentable ignorance). One can say with certainty that the two are pioneers, revitalizing the glorious achievements of a unique personality like Alicia de Larrocha (b. in 1923, in Barcelona), the concert-pianist with the ‘small hands’, who could construct a distinguished international career through sheer hard work, grounded in unrelenting finger exercises, developing an idiosyncratic technique of passionate interpretations of Spanish Music.

This young Duo seems to have also grasped well the craft (not to say ‘art’) of giving Concerts few artists nowadays seem to know – a well-established modern notion experientially developed throughout the ages would make it vital to build-up a concert program according to the traditional concept of a Beginning, a Middle and a climactic End, not a ‘veggie-soup’ as it were – the Russian borscht with everything thrown in … which can be ‘eaten’ even cold!

A Concert (of any music – classical or pop alike) should unravel, display an evolutionary development of Content within earshot of its audience – it must not be a succession of pieces sounding all alike that could fill an evening of entertainment at home with friends …

One extremely vital, nay fatal element is in danger of disappearing from the podium of classical music concerts as a direct result of general ‘dumbing-down’ – Americanization really! – And that is performing by Memory, which is essential to music creation in the very first place.

The areas of the human Brain harbouring the musical experience are closely linked with human Memory, specifically with what is defined as the Long Term Memory. Severing this link can plunge the musician in technical chaos, let alone the intellectual and emotional one. No wonder the Duo had unnecessary slip-ups and silly mistakes unworthy of their skills – occasionally it ruined the clarity of the Cello’s musical diction or articulation. I could not believe that any accomplished string player would fail on his plucking and pizzicati … coupled with some strident head-long playing from the Piano.

I am not for throwing Babies out with the post-modern bath-waters … where anything is OK – and Jerry Springer must be the great American Social Revolutionary of our times – he is of course more intelligent than his hopelessly ridiculous punters and foolish successors, like the British invented Big Brother air-heads.

Cultural values accumulated over long periods of time must be preserved by all means – like learning Music by-heart (a wonderful folk-expression this), then to play it by-mind for an audience. Music that is not memorized by arduous rehearsals over a period of time cannot be re-invented (not to say re-produced) intelligently, let alone with a profound creative instinct that is the life-blood of good and great music-performance.

Concert Music must be played by heart and mind – never the latter without the former. A concert is not, cannot, and must never be a score-reading rehearsal; and I care not what Jerry Springer Managements would promote … Young Soloists do themselves irreparable harm by score-reading performances, which belong to the rehearsal room, and must stay there. [1]

*

The Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) Suite Popular Espaňola for Cello & Piano was a highly intelligent choice to begin the concert with, plunging the audience instantly into the sunny shores and sweet melancholies of de Falla’s Spanish heaven. The composer was one of a cluster of musicians (Bartok in Hungary for example) re-discovering, exploring and developing contemporaneously their national folk-musical culture. He was lucky to be a student of that remarkable musicologist Felipe Pedrell (1841-1922), a Catalan, who was in turn providentially fortunate to have nursed the huge talents of Albeniz and Granados too – any one of whom would have been enough to embrace posterity as their teacher! [2]

El Paňo Moruno, the first of the Six Songs of the Suite (originally Siete Canciones populares espaňolas for Voice and Piano dedicated to Ravel's beloved Ida Godebska, 1914) immediately sucks one’s Soul sensuously into the world of de Falla’s distinctive Spanish (-Russian) sound (3), never to come out again until the swimming end. The Cello is the Singer, accompanied by the Piano, which Miss Manero must try and learn to tone down throughout the series – for these are truly Songs, no more (and nor less) needing subtle, not hectic accompaniment.

Nana is a melody of such exquisite beauty and sweet, unbearable melancholy that it feels as if it tells the whole sad story of mankind’s creation by a mad sado-masochist god, who thinks Man, his own image, must be punished to death through insufferable suffering here on earth, merely to acquire wisdom in an after-life.

Canción and Polo are passionately percussionist, when not discretely melodic. In La Jota, the end piece, occasionally both melody and rhythmic essence unite conflict-free.

The Suite as a whole is like a painterly collection of Renaissance miniature Portraits worked on medallions – each a simple, straightforward, mostly monophonic piece, created as a keepsake, for the civilized lover pining for an unseen beloved.

Granados will be … Granados – A grand Spaniard indeed! Enrique Granados (1867-1916) was the Second of the great Triumvirate of modern Spanish musicians (the others being Albéniz and de Falla) now of classical status – equally with a distinctive sound, yet recognizably … O so Spanish! [4]

Granados, a virtuoso pianist (like Albéniz) was also a painter obsessed with the revolutionary humanism and passion of the compassionate Spanish painter, Francisco José de Goya (1746-1828), who had created a powerful magical realism from the camp ornamentals of the Rococo.

Granados titled his masterpiece, a major Piano Suite (actually a series of suites, individually titled with names from Goya’s Paintings) Goyescas (1911), which became an overnight success, enough to inspire him to convert it into an opera, with the same name, based abundantly on themes from the said piano suites. [5]

Granados’ opera contained the famous Intermezzo for orchestra, played by the Duo as an arrangement (by G. Cassado) for Cello & Piano. While listening to them, I was thinking of Arturo Serna evolving in time into a second Pablo Casals … And I hope he shall know what a great honour I am bestowing upon him. [6]

The Argentinean composer Alberto Evaristo Ginastera’s (1916-1983) Pampeana No 2 for Cello and Piano nicely rounded the first half of the concert with a mini climax. [7]

Although known as an opera composer, Ginastera had moved to Geneva (in 1971), and experimented with everything fashionable going, including twelve-tone music, and microtones – musical intervals smaller than half a tone – pioneering and proto-typing sounds developed later by electronic means of music-making.

His Pampeana No 2 begins with a lengthy introduction that could pass as an improvisational cadenza anytime. It settles down into an interesting dialogue with the Piano, and the whole thing gradually evolves structurally into the Sonata form – the dynamic form of a Sonata, with the typical variations in dynamics, of contrasting rhythms belonging to a symphonic structure.

After the Intermission, came the much-awaited Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), Sonata for Cello and Piano No 2. A giant of a composer (with a gigantic output – over two thousand compositions), this great Brazilian lacks an instantly recognizable sound. [8]

The overlap between Ginastera’s Pampeana (ending the first half of the concert) and this Sonata by Villa-Lobos beginning the second half, must be commended as a piece of highly intelligent and sensitive program-design by the Duo Teresa Carreňo.

While Ginastera’s work was implicitly, covertly of the sonata form, Villa-Lobos is explicitly and overtly so – and there the sensitive similarity ends.

In the first movement (allegro moderato), an entirely unexpected cadenza-like introduction by the … Piano (not the Cello!) hugs the centre of all attention – you would be excused for thinking that this is a solo … Piano piece, until Villa-Lobos eases the Cello in … that is when ‘he’, the ‘virile’ Cello, finally succeeds dropping in casually, on the antics of the Piano, unannounced, pretending that he did not really mean to …

He plays along the piano, not with it, gently seeking to catch her attention – to no avail, she ignores him musically, he is not angry, lets the Piano have her way, finally accepting his failure attempting to dominate her, and more in the bargain – like the New Man of the nineties, the Cello agrees to role-reversal, and ends up accompanying the Piano, honouring her musical alpha-female status …

Villa-Lobos must have been a male-feminist long before the post-modern species was born in the nineties. And this work is a pioneering musical illustration of gender politics – I think intensely subjective and autobiographical. Either, he had an excellent equilateral marriage for as long as it lasted (divorced in 1936), or it reflects the impossible dream of the ideal marriage all heterosexual couples can only fantasize about.

In the andante cantabile of the second movement, the virile cello enters very early on to stake his territory. But soon, almost immediately, he lets his Piano show off in crackling musical pyrotechnics, helping along patiently, unobtrusively. Thus gratified, the feminine Piano defers now to the Cello’s own alpha-male primacy.

In the scherzo, underlined by the allegro scherzando, the Piano cracks musically an excellent joke, a crackling (perhaps even a kama-sutra) joke – the Cello joins in, and they both end in hilarity – an ultra post-modernist moment!

The last movement in appositely selected and defined dynamics as allegro vivace sostenuto is a masterly end to all that went before in this Duo’s Dating-game. They start the movement together, Cello and Piano hand-in-glove, already well-tempered, mated and already married.

Throughout the movement, they both work (play) hard, go their separate ways only to return to their joint inter-play – somehow they stay together (‘married’) in spite of all the musical tensions and anxieties of a power-obsessed social life typical of all hierarchically constructed societies (including that of the Primates in the … Amazon).

Villa-Lobos has one more naughty glint in his musical child’s eyes – of hardly a single bar’s length, but what a magnificent powerful blow – the movement ends with an unexpected huge sound produced jointly by both instruments – a triumphant public declaration of vows (?), of heterosexual Love (?), perhaps Orgasm (?), with a message writ musically large; Married couples of the world – stay put! Or perhaps, Couples of the World – get married!

Whatever it may be, it is inimitable, pristine Villa-Lobos, the Heinrich Heine poetic type.

It would be difficult to top Villa-Lobos – but if anybody could, some of the Argentinean Ástor Piazzolla’s (1921-1992) works would … the student of Ginastera above, and the last item of the program was a well-targeted choice - Le Grand Tango – a magisterial work of great originality. [9] Lo and behold the marvel – a Cello … dances an … Argentinean Tango with a … Piano!

And musically speaking, precisely so, with recognizable rhythmic and melodic elements delineating all the complex variations of Posturing, yo-yoing between the male and the female taking turns in erotic teasing, public foreplay, tender, romantic, and a most beautiful tuneful consummation … even post-coitus rolling-over in bed is there, in Piazzolla’s music!

Suddenly – something Villa-Lobos would do, and Heinrich Heine in poetry – Piazzolla breaks the mould of the tango completely … it is all forgotten in a haze of European musical harmonies.
The Piano tries to return to the tango through musical quotes. The Cello won’t have it … but of course only teasingly just for a moment, he succumbs easily to the Piano’s tango-esque charms, and they start all over again – another dance – tango of course! – And a very different one from the first.

This time, the Piano is very enterprising, very feminist, and erotically very forward … the composition ends with both genders, both instruments very equal, musically singing from the same hymn sheet … A remarkable end to a glorious concert-programming, and a much deserved audience ovation requesting encores ... but not getting them.

One could see how exhausted even these young musicians were, as they had given all to their audience with such total professional commitment and joy.

The Path may be long and arduous, but endowed with exceptional musical intelligence, Greatness certainly awaits them.

Notes on Musical History

[1] On the 28th March 1995, one of the great Pianists of our time, Artur Papazian, the Armenian virtuoso stunned the Carnegie Hall audience in New York by playing Chopin’s 24 Etudes and 24 Preludes with the precise Dynamics of the original by sheer Memory – trained in the grand Romantic tradition of Soviet Piano-playing, Papazian preserves its best traditions and has everything to teach the musicians of the future by his technical musical behaviour.
http://www.papart.com/

[2] There was in late 19th c. this curious pan-European musical interest in all things Spanish – most famously Bizet’s (1838-75) opera Carmen (1875) in France, and Maurice Ravel’s (1875-1937) L’heure espagnole (Spanish Hour – 1911), Tchaikovsky’s frequent references in Russia …

Pedrell discovered genuine old Spanish music preserved in the archives of Rome, where he was a scholar in 1876 subsidized by the Councils of Tarragona and Girona in Spain. Pedrell rescued for example, the Complete Works of Tomas Luis de Victoria (publishing them between 1902 and 1912), thus laying the foundations of ‘modern’ Spanish music, simultaneously introducing Richard Wagner’s music to Spain – the latter fact ignored by those who only wish to see Pedrell as a blinkered musical nationalist.

True, he taught his students total pride and devotion to exploring every nook and cranny of Spanish musical culture – and what a culture of huge nooks and crannies, every bit of regional Spain – Aragón, Andalusia, Catalonia, the Basque country … loci of priceless multi-ethnic accumulated cultural wealth, evolved from the dominant Catholic Church, reluctantly fertilized by the Moors of African Islamic Berber-Arabic progeny … peppered with the Andalusia dancing girls of the Roman times, and salted with Flamenco, the Gypsy Dance from southern Spain with roots in … India, all of which manifest in every piece of those composers, and de Falla most of all.

The latter would leave no stone unturned – in his opera El Retablo (The Puppet Show), he used a Harpsichord – although a precursor of the Piano, but constructed very differently from the hammer-strikes of the piano, its plucked-string tones relate it to the Guitar – evoking the spirit of Domenico Scarlatti, History’s greatest Harpsichordist, who had lived a large part of his life in ... Spain.

De Falla himself had inherited the restless world-weary Spanish Soul. Born in Cádiz, he taught Piano in Madrid, and then settled in Paris for seven years (1907-14), then back to Spain until 1939 – he was inconsolably disturbed by the

gratuitous murder of his friend, Federico Garcia Lorca, one of the great poets of all time, right at the start of the Spanish Civil War by the Fascist lunatics of General Franco who was openly puppeteered by Hitler and Mussolini, and became incredibly the West’s ally after the war.

The British Government’s betrayal of the democratic cause in Spain was indicative of the role Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain would play buttering up to Hitler, betraying the Czechoslovak people next …

De Falla left his beloved country in disgust, never to return, as he reached Argentina … and died there, in Buenos Aires (14th November, 1946), having rejected all ‘friendly’ offers by the war-criminal Franco himself, of a ‘glorious’ return on a fat pension to the fascist regime …

When in Paris, de Falla’s mentor and friend Claude Debussy, the founder of Musical Impressionism, gave him quite a stupid advice – great men and women are not immune to common human stupidities – that he should never write music for Guitar, if he wished to be taken seriously as a serious composer …

A man of gentle but sardonic wit, de Falla seems to have followed Debussy’s foolish advice, until that is, after Debussy’s death, when in 1920 de Falla composed a beautiful piece for … Guitar (the only one of his works written for the instrument), a Homage to his friend titled The Tomb of Claude Debussy, where de Falla quoted Debussy’s own … Piano piece evoking … Granada (La Soirée dans Grenade) – de Falla’s own favourite place on earth.

Alas, alack, who can tell what deadly poison Debussy’s well-meaning mind injected into de Falla’s soul to abort great masterpieces in conception for the Guitar.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) himself was forced into the role of a reluctant musical nationalist who rescued the subtleties of French music from the dominance of Richard Wagner’s brutal, anti-Semitic and quite hysterical Germanic ultra-nationalism – expressed musically in repetitious over-long-and-stretched unresolved chords and keys, and obnoxiously incestuous librettos, written by Wagner’s own self-confessed-and-obsessed Jew-hating self!

Debussy was truly a sophisticated musical internationalist with an insatiable appetite for multi-ethnic forms, travelling in search of them (in 1879) to Florence (very Italian Renaissance), Venice (the Orient in … Italy), Vienna (the best of German, un-spoilt by Wagner) and finally Moscow, as personal composer to Tchaikovsky’s very own patron, the wealthy aristocrat Madame Nadejda von Meck …

The Peoples’ Music – Aristocrats lacked any

A historical development that is not yet properly understood or defined in Musicology is the fact that European classical Music arose from the people’s music, viz. forms created by ordinary people – the illiterate masses everywhere – usually through the dances of peasantry, with erotic lyrics linked with seasonal changes in Nature.

The great composers from Bach to Beethoven and Brahms grounded themselves in (Euro) folklore, to transform those popular dances into the melodies and movements of their Sonatas, and Suites, Concertos, and Symphonies …

Thus, all music, without the slightest doubt – one can insist against all modern musicological ignorance – arose from Folk music – the dances and songs of the anonymous people!
The Euro-Aristocrats had no music – they enjoyed like Peeping Toms watching their peasants celebrate life itself – the historical fact is wonderfully captured by Mozart in The Marriage of Figaro!

The Troubadours that invented Court-music and romantically serenaded the chatelaines imprisoned in ‘golden cages’ with sadistic iron-clad chastity-belts waiting for their aristocratic Knights in shining armoires were not Aristocrats, but nomadic itinerant jobless peasants with the gift of the gab!

When the Aristocrats finally began dancing in their Courts elegantly and stiffly – just to prove they were not vulgar like their sex-mad peasants – they could still only use the well-grounded tunes and rhythms of their Folks!

Thus, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century European gold rush to musical nationalism was merely a revival – a second musical Renaissance – of what Bach to … Brahms via Haydn, Handel and Mozart had done first of all. It was nothing new, and mislabeled as nationalistic!

Nonsense of musical Nationalism – A musicological dogma

Like the best of his ‘nationalist’ labeled contemporaries, De Falla actually never used the tunes of actual Spanish folk songs, but he created his very own inspired by them … And along the way he invented such a distinctive, sensuously (almost erotic) baritone-textured tone, which is immediately recognizable and instantly associated with Spain, that one cannot say whether such a linkage is limiting or enriching – something (a distinctive sound) which the Brazilian patriotic composer Heitor Villa-Lobos lacks, for example – but it is anyway subliminally engulfing of the audience. De Falla’s oeuvre defines Spanish-ness, as the multi-ethnically originated people of Spain had defined him – but is it right or fair that Spain should be defined by one man’s Spain, however great is his genius?

[3] Ironically, de Falla, this most Spanish of composers – speaking purely in musical terms – sounds to me to be also the most … ‘Russian’ – just like his friend and mentor in France, Claude Debussy, who had sojourned in Russia – having imbibed and absorbed orchestration techniques from the great Russian masters, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov … this fact alone could put paid to the musicological dogma about the late 19th century composers that they wished to explore their own musical cultural heritage as ‘ardent nationalists’! The famously named The Five led by Mily Balakirev, an army officer, were even self-taught (like Felipe Pedrell in Spain) – incidentally, an inexplicable miracle in the history of music!

Alexander Borodin (1833-87), one of the first to acquire an international acclaim on the back of his dynamically driven Polovtsian Dances (from Act II of his opera Prince Igor) sounding very … Andalusean to me, was a … Chemist. He had even helped establish a medical school for women – an unacceptable revolutionary concept in Victorian Britain, let alone in backward Russia.
Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), a naval cadet, was their great mentor and master of orchestration, who had learnt all from … Tchaikovsky, and taught all to the Five frequently, even re-touching and finishing their works – Borodin’s unfinished Prince Igor (1889), and Mussorgsky’s (1839-81) Boris Godunov (1896) operas etc.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem Scheherazade (1888) on Oriental-Islamic themes exudes as much the erotic delights of Alhambra-Spain I think, as the aristocratic Spanish dances in the Ballets of Tchaikovsky – in the Swan Lake (1876) and The Nutcracker (1891-2), where no opportunities are missed by jolly courtiers to use castanets and cymbals …

Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840-93), one of History’s greatest masters of orchestration, frequently identified as the paradigm for the Russian nationalist composers, had no … Russian model himself to learn from but the greats of Western classical music – mostly Beethoven, learning from Mozart, learning from Haydn …

Likewise Manuel de Falla, who learnt from Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) – Rimsky-Korsakov’s student – whose seminal The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913) together fecundated I think de Falla’s ballet El Amor Brujo (Love – The Magician, 1915), proven at least by its most famous number, the similarly titled Danza ritual del fuego (Ritual Fire Dance). No wonder, in 1917, Serge Diaghilev, the Russian Ballet impresario who had earlier fecundated Stravinsky’s musical genius did the same to de Falla by commissioning and producing the latter’s El Sombrero de tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat), with set designs by Pablo Picasso.

In a non-verbal matrix like Music, ‘nationalism’ is a fraudulent nonsense – and those composers who fall into its verbal equivalents, end up with egg on their faces, like the racist author of Britain’s National Anthem God Save The King wishing the enemies of the British Royalty dead … the childish verses render what they flatter a laughing stock in the modern world!

The Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) could hardly save his future reputation from the horrendous aberration of having fallen prey in the 1930s to the fascist regime of the ultra-nationalist Getúlio Vargas, who eventually (thank god!) committed suicide, like a Roman! Under economic pressure – no welfare state, no money – Villa-Lobos, just like a … Stalinist composer, underwent even the stupidity of publishing in about 1941 A Música Nacionalista no Govêrno Getúlio Vargas, singing the lunacies of the ultra-racist fascist ideology of the ‘sacred nation’ – über alles! – And its ‘sacred flag’ and all that Buzz-buzz!

What saved his soul from its sale to the fascist devil was Bach’s divine music – between 1932 (No. 1 for 8 cellos) and 1944 (No. 9 for Chorus or String Orchestra) Villa-Lobos produced one of the most original, beautiful, nation-less (internationalist), spiritual compilation of nine pieces known as Bachianas Brasileiras – deserving of Johann Sebastian Bach, the god of all music.

God and the Spirit belong to the whole non-racist world … The Bachianas placed Villa-Lobos among the greats of all music, while also simultaneously ironically inventing … Brazilian-music as a genre, whatever that may mean. All fascist attempts to eliminate the multi-culture nature of Brazilian society by definition have failed, since the Portuguese times, and shall never succeed – being merely tragically wasteful of human life and foolishly of natural resources.

The Use and Abuse of Nationalism

The problem of Nationalism is perhaps the most complex of socio-economic and political relations. Its evolutionary origins lie in the very intricate development of individual consciousness – The search and acquisition of identity throughout life is an extension of the trait of Consciousness attributed uniquely to the human animal – it is what makes the humanoid a human being, followed by ‘speciation’ – finding physical security and safety in numbers or, Group-belonging in modernist non tribal societies (US Gangs, British Football Hooligans etc.), which is the equivalent of totemic tribal identity exemplified in infantile patriotism – standing to attention in front of a flagpole and childishly singing to it … This then constitutes the primary form of a passionate Nationalism – thus a natural evolutionary process in human development.

The record of human history however proves that all such natural needs of consciousness are easily perverted into criminal acts – in this case, that of ultra-nationalism that invents and feeds racist fantasies – select elites massaging themselves by the tomfoolery of thinking they are superior to all others … while listening to Wagner!

A friend of mine, Robert Kruszynski, of Polish parentage, Biologist and Social Anthropologist, has an acute observation; “Nationalism is the specter that has been haunting Europe since at least 1789 (national sentiments can be found of course way back in the Middle Ages of Europe). It is, without a doubt in my mind, the most important political force of modern times …”

True, and I like Robert’s wonderful pun on the first paragraph of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Robert continues (in a personal communication), “In a nutshell, it is important not to demonize the concept of nationalism, which per se is not the issue, but what is done with it.” I fully agree with him that the need for individual national identity is a natural human need that must be acknowledged and can be channeled for positive societal achievements, but not if it implies that one should drop one’s guard and constant vigilance against the murderous consequences of Euro-American imperialist Nationalism.

Why is it that in the cradle of modern nationalism, the 19th c. Europe, it went awry and produced fascist Nazism, of the genocidal racist paradigm under which the whole world is suffering, still, and moreover, having turned cancerous under the neo-con American disease for world domination. Perhaps we need a new word, like … ‘root-ism’, to replace the infantile childishness of US patriotism, and the much murderously soiled and nazified ‘nationalism’.

Artificially invented mono-ethnic national boundaries in Africa and Asia were convenient fraudulent means of imperialist domination. No one puts it better than Andy Lowings, not an anthropologist, sociologist, or a historian, but a musician in search of the roots of the Lyre music in the Middle East and Africa – “I landed in Nairobi, Kenya, in the heart of Africa … I think that my preconception of national boundaries representing the people within them had by now taken a new and enlightened turn. Ethiopia where I had just come from has some 70 individual ethnic groups, with their own languages, Kenya has some 42….Movements of people and their musical instruments transcend all modern borders…. It is a huge complexity of language, customs, geography and history.” [“Exploring an ancient civilization’s modern legacy in Africa”, an unpublished paper by Andy Lowings, Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship 2007].

India and China have a hundred ‘nationalities’ each … The world has seen nothing yet, until they shatter internally under the globalized pressure of barbaric capitalist inequalities. Ironically, the only hope of a peaceful future lies in the civilized socialist notion of racial equality – a musical harmony!

The European ‘nationalist’ composers plunged into their countries’ intellectually neglected cultures – in their turn totally multi-ethnic, hence ripe for exciting discoveries to be made – in search of new musical forms and fresh innovative expressions, not as drumbeats for racist nationalism – what patriotic Musicologists have merely fantasized.

What is denied hitherto by blinkered imperialist historians is the unalterable historical fact that the imperialist ‘nations’ themselves were constituted entirely by multi-ethnic diversity. Catherine the Great was not Russian! Marie Antoinette was not French … The present peoples of any South American country, for example, have the most astounding surnames that have fossilized global ethnic diversity, and not only from Europe – a ‘Gandelman’ from Brazil, for example, is a … Yiddish ‘candle-man’ from an Orthodox Russian stetl caged in a Nazi Polish ghetto …

Tchaikovsky’s whole work creates if not reflects a multi-ethnic world – the Court dances in his Ballets, Italian Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture (1870), Capriccio Italien (op. 45, 1880), German-titled Manfred Symphony (op. 58, 1885), Symphony No. 2 (1873), which he revised subsequently and titled I think very subversively Little Russian at a time when Russian racist chauvinism was having a field-day aggrandizing themselves as Great Russians by belittling everybody else of their neighbours – the Poles and the Ukrainians to mention but two – Nikolai Gogol, their greatest novelist of the day, was actually a … Ukrainian often denigrated with an abusive rude nickname khokhol (= cock’s crest! referring to the Cossack haircut – the Ukrainian underdogs reciprocated, name-calling the Russians katsap =goat-like!). Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet who had modernized the antiquated Russian language was the grandchild of an … African slave-boy brought over as a gift to the Tsar – the mind boggles as to what for!

Composing an opera titled The Oprichnik (1872), Tchaikovsky dared throw a gauntlet to the Tsar’s oprichniki – the Dog-head geared black-shirted proto-Nazi SS first invented by Ivan the Terrible, to torture and murder, literally boiling alive in huge vats, the sick-minded Tsar’s perceived enemies. Tchaikovsky, with a brave heart courageously dared baptize his Symphony No. 3 (1875) The Polish!

Rimsky-Korsakov, a 2nd Tchaikovsky in his unsurpassable mastery of orchestration, followed the latter’s multi-ethnic musical explorations every step of the way, and leaving it as an unalterable legacy to his students and followers, Igor Stravinsky among them, who would become a pioneer of soaking up the Black American Jazz idiom into the modern musical discourse.

The Spaniards, and the South Americans, for historical reasons, were there already waiting in the wings. Stravinsky, although initially abused in Paris, offered them and subsequently everybody else in the musical world the green light of respectability to integrate Jazz – the Black Man’s Music – and its syncopated rhythms into the modernist classical idiom.

Unfortunately, Stravinsky too suffered from the occasional bout of human stupidity – he wrote in his Autobiography (1936) with an incredible masochism and self-harm – “Music is, by its very nature …. Powerless to express anything at all” – utter tosh! denying the essence of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Beethoven’s 1-9 Symphonies – precursors of the 19th c. genre of the ‘Symphonic Poem’, evolving into Debussy’s ‘musical impressionism’ (the masterly La Mer = The Sea, 1905) … and his own very work The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913) where Stravinsky succeeds perfectly to express musically complex narrative themes and metaphors. Obviously, they shared intellectual foolishness … what is not acknowledged and I think very unfairly is Debussy’s own influence (Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune - 1894) on Stravinsky’s said works.

[4] Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz (1860-1909), the oldest of Spain's musical Triumvirate was born in Campodón, and although a child prodigy on the piano, he must have had a disturbed childhood – incredibly, at the age of thirteen, he reached … South America, and survived working as a peripatetic pianist. By fifteen, he was back in Europe, studying at the Conservatory in Brussels, where in 1878 he was tutored by no less than History’s greatest technician of Piano music, the Hungarian Franz Liszt, before joining Felipe Pedrell in 1883 in Barcelona.
In 1892, Albéniz settled down in Paris, where his house provided warmth for Spanish artists including Granados and de Falla, and by which time Albéniz had composed a series of dances representing different regions of Spain (compiled in 1887 as Suite Espaňola). This had a seminal inspirational direct influence on the music of his compatriots – Granados similarly composed twelve Spanish Dances (12 Danzas Espaňolas), and echoes can be detected in de Falla’s Seven Spanish Popular Songs, some of which are also dance tunes, like La Jota (of the Aragón region).

An English eccentric, Francis Burdett Coutts, the inordinately wealthy heir of no less than the Bankers (Coutts & Co.) to Britain’s Royalty was mad for writing librettos on fanciful heroics like the legendary King Arthur … he generously contracted Albéniz (in 1894) to his service in London, where the composer could bring his wife Rosina and family of three children – their lives secured financially for good.

As Francis Coutts got bored with writing librettos, it created a mental and an emotional space for Albéniz to return to his own musical truth grounded in the Spanish landscape, to produce finally his masterpiece Iberia (1905-8). Little could anyone predict that a year later, on a fun-trip to the French Pyrenees (in May 1909), the great composer would catch kidney infection (nephritis) and pass away, leaving a legacy that would nourish the Spanish soul, as much that of Granados, who had the misfortune of sharing similarly an unnecessary death, even worse and totally preventable!

*
[5] Granados’ opera Goyescas was to be premiered in 1914 in Paris. The outbreak of the ridiculous First World War instigated by the German Kaiser (a grandson of the British Queen Victoria) ruined the occasion. Instead, the premiere took place in peaceful New York (on the 26th of January, 1916) in as yet neutral America. Granados attended the occasion with his wife. The success was huge, enough for President Woodrow Wilson to invite him for a Piano recital … which forced him to miss his boat directly back to Spain – no air-travel then!

Instead, he took one to England, where he changed ship, to board a passenger-ferry named Sussex bound for Dieppe in France. Nobody knew that the German mad Kaiser had decided on a new concept of loose war – referred to as total – murdering non-combatants – soft targets and the innocent masses. Napoleonic old-style wars were conducted strictly between armies, according to rigid soldierly rules – not any longer for the mad Kaiser.

And as a first idea in innovative evil, the Anglo-German Kaiser had decided to try out his new toy, a U-boat (UB 29) to torpedo the Sussex (March 1916) outraging the world. Half of the ship was instantly destroyed in the English Channel – fifty lives lost immediately.

The Great Granados, lucky and safely in a life-boat notices his wife Amparo at some distance struggling in the water. He jumps in to save his wife, only to be drowned himself … they say he had nursed a morbid fear of water (hydrophobia) throughout his life!

What a rare human being – what deep heterosexual love – What depth of Heterosexual love – A true Hero, not a Wagnerian camp incestuous Nazi Phony – how sad – how tragic – how … Everything!

Such an unnecessary crime – a great creative artist as one of the first totally innocent, Jesus-like victims of the world’s first foolish global war …

Should not Germany today apologize for it, and compensate Spain by creating a fund for creative Spanish artists?

*

[6] Precisely as Segovia had created the classical Guitar, Pablo Casals (1876-1973) created the classical Cello – and both Spaniards began with Johann Sebastian Bach – a miraculous historical coincidence?

Casals’ performances of Bach’s Suites for unaccompanied Cello are the crown jewels of the world’s classical recordings – if the world is worth saving from the catastrophe of the climate change, it would be worth to save it for Casals/Segovia recordings of Bach’s music …

Born at Vendrell, a Catalan town, Casals was a child prodigy, son of an Organist cum music teacher father. By the age of 12, he could already play quite a few instruments of the orchestra. While an accomplished pianist, composer, and conductor, Casals was of course ultimately his cello, and the world’s ultimate cello … he invented new techniques of bowing and fingering.

Casals was also a great humanitarian all creative artists should emulate all over the world – I say, Globalize Pablo Casals’ dedication to world peace, not America’s obsession with capitalist warmongering.

Like de Falla, Casals rejected Franco’s fascist regime, sustained by Great Britain and later America that had strangled to death the democratically elected Spanish Republican government, supported by all the democrats of Europe, drowned in blood by Hitler and Mussolini in the slaughterhouse of the Spanish Civil War (1936-9).

Like de Falla, Casals too left Spain in disgust in 1939, never to return (he died in Puerto Rico). Further than de Falla, by late 1940s, Casals refused to play in any country – and especially Britain and America – that approved of General Franco. Only in 1963, aged 87, he lifted his self-imposed embargo partially, only to conduct (at London’s Festival Hall) his own composition advocating world peace – an Oratorio titled El Passebre (The Manger).

*

[7] Born in Buenos Aires of a Catalan father and an Italian mother, Ginastera was another of those multi-ethnic restless Spanish souls – he studied in America (1945-7) with the American modernist composer Aaron Copland, returned to his city Buenos Aires and co-founded the (Argentinean) League of Composers, only to return to the United States (1968), then finally to settle in Europe (1970) and died in Geneva, Switzerland aged 67.

*
[8] Ignoring his pompous nationalist hot-air, I would characterize the best of Heitor Villa-Lobos as French-Italianate music.

His genius is protean, Shakespearean, adapts to forms, and adopts them for his gargantuan musical appetites. And he always keeps stings in his musical tails that bite off all stereotypical expectations from the Western classical music formats he employs so abundantly. He builds them up only to subvert them, in the nick of time, just before the end of a section or a piece –
In musical technique, Villa-Lobos is like a naughty child given expensive time-honoured toys he plays with, constructs a tower, admires it, gets bored, and to the fury of complacent parents as the audience, knocks them down …

He reminds me very much (in literature) of the great German poet Heinrich Heine, who uniquely in classical German literature does precisely the same with words. Heine – the German poet with the most humour! – frequently slaughters the reader’s sacred cows.

*

[9] There is nothing like seeing with your own eyes Piazzolla play his bandoneón, covering his own heart with it, and gradually fanning it out like a huge butterfly … producing music in Bach-like grandeur of a fugue! The bandoneón as played by him turns instantly at once into a poor man’s miniscule orchestra, generating sounds as pleasant as in chamber music – say a Haydn Quartet.

And Piazzolla was as fertile a composer as Villa-Lobos, topping the latter’s 2000 pieces by a thousand more to 3000 …

Strangely, just like Albeniz at the age of 13 reaching South America, Piazzolla at 13 was head-hunted by Carlos Gardel – a master of the tango – to tour with his band. Unlike the case of Albeniz, the Italian parents of Piazzolla refused point blank to let their child go – Gardel and his band sadly soon after perished in an aeroplane crash …

Piazzolla grew up to escape the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-83) by living in his parents’ country, Italy. His revolutionary transformation of the tango inspired the social revolutionaries of the Argentine society, proving that dynamic political change was possible, if even the eternally fixed tango they thought was unalterable could be changed for the better and the richer …

The bandoneón itself is quite an extraordinary instrument. Piazzolla, its greatest grandest master performer says in a BBC-TV interview (accessible on YouTube), “anyone wants to play bandoneón must be mad” – and he is not joking (although of course he was partly …)

Like a modern Japanese Yamaha keyboard, the bandoneón ‘contains’ the texture of several orchestral instruments, especially strings-in-a-Quartet! Its maverick inventor was a German by the name of Heinrich Band, who intended it as a poor man’s instrument to perform … religious music normally accompanied on grand Church Organs. He could never imagine that his compatriots, German emigrants would carry it with them in early 20th c. to Argentina, where it would become an instrument for the erotic tango played in brothels …

And a musical genius like Piazzolla would come along to save the instrument from its local use to equal the global Church Organ – more than Heinrich Band could have ever dreamt of or hoped for.

The buttons on both sides of this ‘mad’ odd instrument do not constitute a keyboard like the ones on the conventional accordion. And worst – more maddeningly – most of the buttons on the bandoneón do not produce the same note when opening its accordion-folds outwards or closing them inwards.

There are thus two sets of different buttons to be learnt for each pitch (or single note) on each aggregate of the buttons on each side, both together amounting overall to a schizophrenic … four keyboards!

It does need a … genius to play it perfectly, let alone to transform it into a church Organ! And that genius was undoubtedly the unique Piazzolla – another like him shall never be.

Visit http://godsavehugochavez.blogspot.com/

Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2008-04-20T17:50:00.000-07:00

The Perfect Union of Two Minds - João Luiz & Douglas Lora

Brasil Guitar Duo – Bolivar Hall, London – Friday 29 February, 2008, 7.30 pm

I was delighted to discover that the cultural co-operation between the Brazilian and the Venezuelan Embassies in London is continuing, and with such compassionate elegance -- something the English can learn from the South Americans! -- the handsome Brazilian Attaché dedicated the evening’s concert to the outgoing Venezuelan Lady-Attachée …

Although Guitar-like instruments have surfaced through the archeological record, the ‘modern’ Guitar seems to have emerged in Spain and as the poor people’s preferred instrument, in imitation of the Aristocracy’s viluela endowed with six double-courses (each being a pair of strings). The poor could hardly afford such extravagance of strings … so, by the mid-eighteenth century, the double-courses were made single, and a sixth was added at the top end of the five strings (reduced from the rich man’s twelve).

The Hawaiians re-invented their own steel-guitar, and played it placed across the knees … The North Americans conceived of the Electrical Guitar in the 1930s, and the American musician Les Paul made it the staple of the Pop-world by the nineteen-forties.

Francisco Tárrega (1852-1909), the Spanish composer saved the Guitar from its depths of proletarian depression … and turned it into a noble (‘aristocratic’) instrument of solo concerts. His passion for it as a child, seems to have been aroused by a local player known as The Blind Man of the Sea = el ciego de la Marina. Tárrega settled in Paris, then again to return finally to Barcelona in 1882, to establish a School. He developed new techniques of performance, and transcribed Handel, Mozart and Chopin for the Guitar.

But the man who created the classical Guitar was of course the great master-musician Andrés Segovia (1893-1987), recently under attack by John Williams, a considerable English musician himself, who incredibly – and I think very foolishly – called Segovia “a limited musician” (John Williams on Segovia, BBC Music Magazine, 1999). One wonders what had come over John Williams that day to utter such a monstrous nonsense.

I contend that Segovia single-handedly invented the Classical Guitar – one can almost date it precisely to 1935 – And he did it with an extraordinary instinctual intelligence by hitting on a remarkably simple musical idea – he played Bach’s Chaconne on his guitar … from that pin-prick of concentrated energy, exploded the Big Bang of the classical guitar the whole world now takes for granted.

João Luiz and Douglas Lora are a young Brazilian Guitar Duo of classical guitar mastery unequalled in their intellectual union of perfect equivalence. Every aspect of their musical skill seems to be perfectly balanced in equilateral doses – tonal texture, range of musical phraseology, range and breath of technical ability, rhythmic feeling, emotional key-ing, in a word, their individual musicality sounds (and I intend a pun) equal.

I have never encountered such a perfect union of two minds – musical twins conjoined at the heart!

Domenico Scarlatti (Sonata L305 in Sergio Abreu’s transcription for 2 guitars) was an excellent introduction to the Duo’s perfect mental and musical harmonies, which then blossomed in the 3 Preludes and Fugues (op 199) by the prolific modern composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco – an Italian whose surname Tedesco means German in Italian … in 1939, fearing for his life as a Jew, he had escaped to America, where he acquired citizenship in 1946, settled in California and wrote also film-music, ten concertos, several operas, endless piano pieces, songs, and chamber music ...

Four Hands as Two

Our Brazilian Duo seem to be pioneering in recording C-Tedesco’s work – no wonder, because their conjoined musical being is perfectly born to realize the most original manifest nature of C-Tedesco’s The Well-tempered Guitars, based on treating the Two performers as One as if playing the Piano … each player represents the Right and the Left hands of the single virtual Keyboard player – Lora, mostly the melodious Right, Luiz, mostly the pulsating base line Left, occasionally alternating the musical game – four hands are truly two, and both really belong to one, playing a Baroque keyboard – for, C-Tedesco had mastered both Baroque and Piano music – a remarkable sound to experience and a sight to behold … two guitars, a keyboard hand each, Right & Left, playing polyphonic harmony rather than a single monomatrix piece, melody shifting from one to the other, while the ‘other’ stays as accompaniment … The unity of the two is vital as the breath-of-life of their musical performance – there can be no other two guitarists besides this Brazilian Duo capable of such a feat perfectly suited for Tedesco’s music.

Piazzolla’s Pioneering Argentinean Music

Complicated musical disruptions in the programme began predictably with the great Astor Piazzolla’s music (Zita) – he of the fame that introduced complex Western classical music harmonies into the Argentinean Tango, and succeeded brilliantly transforming both.

Piazzolla was a mere accordion player – the large kind called bandoneon in Argentina. The Tango was the only music Piazzola knew as a child, before he studied with Alberto Evaristo Ginastra, an Argentine Composer who had moved to Geneva in 1971, and whose Malambo seems to me to have been heavily influenced by the Soviet Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (1903-78) – the latter’s Saber Dance from the Ballet Gayaneh (1942) was an iconic world-wide hit during my own youth – everyone on the planet then seemed to have heard it, or of it …

But Piazzolla’s greatest good fortune was studying Composition with Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) in Paris. This lady was a remarkable woman – a conductor who pioneered the revival of Monteverdi’s music, becoming the first woman-Musician ever to conduct (between 1937-9) full concerts with the London Royal Philharmonic Society, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic – someone (a woman-Conductor I mean) still extremely rare in the concert halls of the world.

What’s more, Boulanger possessed the uniquely non-racist approach to ethnic/national music – she encouraged all her multi-ethnic students to think of their own musical roots as the Music they must explore and re-invent, instead of imitating the language and idioms of the European classical harmonies.

Not understanding properly Boulanger’s pioneering non-racist concept of musical composition, leads euro-centric musicologists to misrepresent the extraordinary oeuvre of someone like Piazzolla by insisting that he married the very limited medium of the Argentinean tango with complex European forms.

The truth is otherwise – following Nadia Boulanger’s wise advice, the Tango was all the music Piazzolla wanted to write, and his intensely original transformation of the Tango was all music!

His tango sinfónico (= symphonic tango) was not a new musical genre as Western musicologists would like to think, but the very “contemporary music of Buenos Aires” itself, as Piazzolla himself said and thought of it.

The second part of the Guitar concert (after Intermission) was dedicated to Brazilian music. Brazilians, like all South Americans and other nations economically and culturally marginalized hitherto by Western imperialism (including my own Armenian people, Jews, Arabs, Turks, Indians …) are understandably culturally too self-righteous and unduly sensitive, making life extremely difficult for well-meant constructive criticism and democratic free speech.

The Catholic religiosity of the South American masses, with the Pope’s infallibility as an imitable paradigm, re-affirms this kind of ultra-nationalist nonsense. They want to be either loved or hated, nothing in between – even if you were to praise them ninety-nine percent, they get hugely massively hurt by one percent of disagreement as offensive criticism – enough to never speak to you again ...

I am reminded of the Narrator of the great Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis’ (1839-1908) masterpiece Dom Casmurro – the very first words of the novel describe the hilarious incident whereby a civilized high-powered “young man” sits next to him on the train to a suburb of Rio de Janeiro – this very polite young man tells our Narrator of his “ministerial comings and goings, and ended up reciting some of his verses.” All nice and very well … until our otherwise tired Narrator cannot help nodding off … The “Next day, he started calling me insulting names, and ended up nicknaming me Dom Casmurro”, which of course means Mr. Grumpy – the title of Machado’s Novel. (*)

Risking such, I shall say that Edu Lobo’s Valsa Brasileira (arranged for 2 guitars by J. Luiz, one of the Duo) was anything but a recognizable waltz (in the traditional genre of a Blue Danube …), equally the case of D. Lora’s (the other one of the Duo) Valsa, otherwise a very pleasant dainty composition dedicated to his daughter. Those two examples of a Brazilian ‘waltz’ leads me to surmise that perhaps after all a Brazilian-waltz is not a … Waltz, but just a formal excuse for some nice music-making.

I must also disagree with the Duo’s extreme enthusiasm and pride in the works of Paulo Bellinati (Bom Partido – a samba that did not sound like one …) and Jacob do Bandolim (Doce de Coco = coconut candy; arr. For 2 guitars by J. Luiz), the only interesting originality of which was its sudden abrupt ending!

The works of both composers as played by the Duo are no more than interesting warm-up exercises with skillful counterpoint in … presto moderato.

Gismonti – a Brazilian Gem

What I found most absorbing in the Brazilian second half of the concert was Egberto Gismonti’s extraordinary 7 Anéis = 7 rings (arr. for 2 guitars by J. Luiz), in G Flat – a hell of a job to reproduce on Guitar – accomplished by the Duo with seamless efficiency.

Gismonti’s said work begins very mundanely though pleasantly … suddenly, a strange few bars of what could only be described as … rain-drops in a rainforest, contrapuntally powerful enough to disturb the flow of the musical stream …

And the music is instantly transformed into an Amazonian landscape – the Amazon meandering through dark and dank forests, with little-seeming but significant harmonic interferences here and there – perhaps a monkey jumping through the trees – a snake appearing and quickly disappearing into the undergrowth, a huge flower blossoming for the first time in a decade … all happening on the shores of the huge river running in ostinato (repeating patterns) to the sea … a most original narrative scene I am certain unintended by a quirky musical genius of Brazilian music.

If nothing else, the revelation of Gismonti’s genius in this concert was a prize worth waiting for, offered by this joyous young Duo leading the creative life of a couple in honeymoon.

Dialectical Musical Divorce

I cannot wait for them to age and mature and … start bickering musically speaking, attempting to divorce – Marital Divorce in my books is always wrong if children are involved in the equation.

However, in musical terms, tense contrapuntal dialectical harmonies (marital feuds) and their nuptial resolution (unlike in life …) constitute the dynamic soul of any music in any national culture - Arnold Schoenberg's (1874-1951) a-tonal creations while intellctually interesting are melodic disasters proving the point!

This guitar Duo may not want to, but could and I think must eventually expand its musical repertoire on the basis of enhanced individuality – not the two hands of the same person, but the skillful hands of two persons immensely talented.

The conjoined twins can be separated musically at the heart (though not in life of course – and art is definitely not life) but nevertheless stay simultaneously conjoined … in their minds.

Endnote

(*) vide, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro, translated from the Portuguese by John Gledson, with a Foreword by John Gledson, and an Afterword by João Adolfo Hansen, Oxford University Press paperback, New York, 1998, p. 3.

In a pioneering paper titled Society and Ethics in Machado de Assis’s Rio de Janeiro and Charles Dickens’s London, read at the Brazilian Embassy in London (during the week of 18-22 June, 2007, celebrating the œuvre of Machado de Assis), the authoress Ms Nadia Kerecuk provides enough interesting material to make it the subject of a book.

And I am glad it has not occurred to Ms Kerecuk to call Machado the ‘Charles Dickens of the Brazilian literature’, as I think Machado possesses a certain stylistic sophistication of form and content matched only by Cervantes.

I myself have no hesitation in labelling Machado ‘the Cervantes of the Brazilian Literature’.

The received wisdom of the dictionary-meanings of the word casmurro are ones that quote Machado’s own title as … evidence; Grumpy, ratty, angry, bitter, unpleasant, a sour-puss really!

However, I think there is a complex subtle Machado-esque pun on casa=house, and muro=wall, producing House-wall, the equivalent in English of the insulting expression of a ‘Brick-wall’!

I would translate Machado’s title of the novel (Dom Casmurro) as Mr. Brick-wall.

Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2008-03-27T13:35:00.000-07:00

Wonderful Music – Great Musicianship
Ana Beatriz Manzanilla (Violin) and Pedro Saglimbeni Muňoz (Viola)

Violin and Viola Recital - at the Bolivar Hall, Venezuelan Cultural Centre

Thursday, the 20th March 2008, 7.30 pm

Ana Beatriz Manzanilla (Violin) and Pedro Saglimbeni Muňoz (Viola) constitute an original Duo of first-class musicianship. Venezuelan born, they live in Portugal (since 1996), and have been stars of the Gulbenkian Orchestra – honouring the name of Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), the Armenian pioneer of the Oil-Industry known internationally in his time as Mr. Five Percent for owning that amount of the British IPC - Iraq Petroleum Company that in full daylight robbery shamelessly requisitioned the Iraqi people’s Oil for four decades without paying a penny to the people in Iraq.

The Duo opened their concert with Mozart’s Duo for Violin and Viola in G Major, KV 423 – a joyous occasion when any Mozart is played, even if it were his darker Requiem, or the magnificent melody anticipating Don Giovanni’s throw into Hell!

Mozartologists have presumed that Mozart could not manage to finish his Requiem before The Great Reaper took him ... my own view is that Mozart consciously could not complete it – he was I think incapable of conceiving cheerless morbid music – even at his most pessimistic, in the call-to-Hell theme for Don Giovanni, there is an underlying musical grandeur and brilliant gloriousness that can only uplift the human soul, never damn it … Mozart it seems was born to be the greatest optimist of human culture on this planet.

Typical of the happy-go-lucky Mozart, this Duo was no exception, in traditional construction of 3 movements, with the Viola performing the Bass role.

What a dramatic contrast to Bohuslav Martinů’s (1890-1959) Three Madrigals, composed in 1947, when this Czech composer had already escaped the Second World War in Europe, by fleeing to the United States (1940-6) for physical safety, but curiously could not escape the profoundly disturbing psychological effects of the global European devastation, producing a series of six symphonies awash in dissonant texture and tonality, contrasted and highlighted (in neo-classical style) by the melodious snippets of dream-like classical beauty.

The “three” of the title is a clever pun on the classical form of three Movements, manifest in the traditional rhythmic structure of the piece – fast/slow/fast (faster than the first movement).

The first Madrigal (read, movement for it!) is flooded in the psychoneuroses of unbearable European warmongering – extremely unpleasant and nerve-wrecking, resulting in a jumble of jangled nerves. The second movement (read for it, Madrigal) attempts desperately to forget the jungle of warring nerves, trying to capture some kind of solace in tsigane-music. Finally, in the third madrigal, Martinů plunges headlong into the technically demanding highs of the tsigane-pyrotechnics, occasionally remembering and echoing the War, but this time emergent out of the difficulties of the nomadic Gypsy life-style reflected in the latter’s music.

Most astonishingly, the most Europeanized of the Brazilian composers, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) seems to have been totally oblivious to the miserable stupidities of the European theatre (of the Second World War). His 1946 Duo for Violin and Viola will have none of it!

Herein, the world can go to hell, as far as Villa-Lobos is concerned – he has composed a piece of classical music interest, with a remarkable innovative jazz-like experimentation.

The Allegro establishes the Viola, not as an instrument of accompaniment, but as a separate voice, independent of the Violin and equivalent to it.

Villa-Lobos goes further – dares to let the Viola begin the Adagio with a melody – a role usually left to the Violin – forcing the Violin into the secondary-role of the accompanist. However, the latter (the Violin) soon takes over, only to be sidetracked by a second theme, again from the Viola…

Again, while the Violin succeeds in eventually restoring its top status, Villa-Lobos subverts it by giving the Violin the tonality, the texture and the baser pitches of the … Viola!

Hardly the Violin has … become a Viola, when the Viola, as if in rebuke, steals the End, and ends the Adagio.

In the concluding third movement (of the piece), all is well, all bitchy competitiveness is forgiven and forgotten, and they happily play together, but as Equals, not any in a subservient role ...

Perhaps, after all - I cannot be certain - Villa-Lobos too was conscious (subconsciously?) of the European lunacies of the war, but in a sort of vague unconscious way, longing for peace and harmony, just as his Violin and Viola were achieving it in socialist equality.

And O for Handel, the great Handel of the great Messiah of the Paschal Lamb in these days of Easter … His Passacaglia contains I think an undoubted pun on the paschal hitherto undiscovered in music-history.

In the version of the Norwegian violinist/composer Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935) played by this Venezuelan Duo, it takes on a strange life of its own – Paganini split-up in two …

Ana Manzanilla and Pedro Munňoz fittingly become a single two-in-one Paganini virtuosi – Muňoz plays his Viola astonishingly like a Strad-Violin, while Manzanilla plays her Violin in virtuosic peak-form – their ordinary run-of-the-mill instruments worked at breaking point …

I say, give this Venezuelan Duo … Stradivari and they shall produce heavenly music!

*

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Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2007-12-04T12:26:00.000-08:00

The Love and Passion of Leo Gandelman

First Festival of Brazilian Music in London [iii]
at Venezuela’s Bolivar Hall – 2 & 3 November 2007, 7.30pm.

*

With Leo Gandelman, Saxophonist par excellence, a Paganini-style virtuoso, and his Band, you are back into the folds of traditional jazz – with a piano, and Oh what a Piano! Grand and ultra-modern performance by David Feldman – and musical improvisation, though (interestingly enough to observe) not in the world of syncopated rhythms such music is usually linked with.

Gandleman is most certainly a classical man, and a man of the classics – with 3 different Saxophones on the stage – tenor, alto, basso – and perhaps ‘ten’ more … at home in Brazil, the new Brit-American Govs restrictions would not allow him to bring along on the airplanes in case his jazzman’s breath explodes the aircraft …

Gandelman plays the Saxophone and every possible tonal and textural permutation of it like … Paganini played the violin and the latter’s critics of medieval mindset thought that the Devil had possessed Paganini enabling him to do all sorts of things no other violinist until then was ever able to perform. I bet the medieval fundamentalists of red-neck America would think the same if they ever had the chance of experiencing Leo Gandelman and his Band, with David Feldman at the piano, whose fingers sometimes like a plectrum pluck on the hammers inside the Grand Piano’s wing, and plays it like a huge guitar …

This young David is a … Goliath of the piano, so blended with it and his music-making that he succeeds in converting the piano into an extension of his own body – you cannot tell whether he becomes the piano, or vice versa, the piano becomes his fingers … David Feldman’s future is even more brilliant than his present – he shall soon be a second Duke Ellington who can now rest in total peace and harmony...

Incredible but True

Could anyone ever think or imagine that delicate almost feminine pizzicati – the mark of Paganini’s diabolical violin playing, could ever be achieved on a Saxophone, the most virile of the musical instruments?

Incredibly, that technical impossibility is achieved by Leo Gandelman, whose music pours out of every pore of his body – a tall, slender figure, dressed in all white, he cuts the shape of a Chekhovian Seagull … his 2nd night appearance was like a Crow at the Tower of London – dressed in all black, with a beaten up face and a weathered alto Saxophone looking like an old banger of a car, but the music it produced via Gandelman’s godly breath was as tonally perfect and texturally beautiful as anything human can ever be.

To say that Gandelman is an old Pro and a true showman –especially when he reveals his idiosyncratic trademark towards the end of his shows – he deserts the stage to his Band and descends the stairs to join the audience while playing continuously for individual audience-members, covering the whole auditorium front to back and back to front, driving people Bacchus-wild and mad-drunk on his music – it is high compliment indeed in British cultural terms, but it recognizes nothing of Leo Gandelman’s genuine warmth and extraordinary humanity towards his fellow man manifest through a consummate artistry.

People (the audience) feel loved by Gandelman’s love of sheer music and his virtuoso music-creations (not to say production). I could witness it – I was lucky enough to be there – and I wouldn’t care if I had just won the obscene sums of the British Lottery!

Leo Gandelman is human love and music incarnate. Music and love for humanity stream out of him as in the flood plains of the Amazon River. A classical stylist from the moment of his first appearance – he shuts his eyes and is off, creating his own world of fertile sound – and when he opens his eyes and is back again, already his keyboard player is in his (Leo’s) created world, in total harmony with him.

And so are Gandelman’s youthful Drums (Allen Pontes), and Bass (Alberto Continentino), even his technician (David Ruv) … they all adore him – very soon to be joined by everyone in the audience, young and middle-aged and old alike, in awe and wonder at Leo’s playing of every possible Saxophone type, from the Bass Sax to the Alto, which sings like a flute on his lips and sounds like a Clarinet in his hands.
Gandelman is such a total master of the instrument that it seems he could play any kind of saxophone under the sun with equal virtuosity.

Musical Jokes – Humour in Serious Music

The great Haydn, “Father of the Symphony”, possessed a great sense of humour – in the 2nd Movement (andante) of his Symphony No. 94 in G nicknamed ‘The Surprise Symphony’, he put a sudden loud chord to “startle the Ladies”!

In the ‘Clock Symphony’ No. 101 in D, again for the 2nd Movement, he wrote in a ticking accompaniment, and a lot of fooling around in the Menuetto allegretto.

My (and most people’s) favourite is the massive protest-joke in defense of his fellow musicians’ human rights, daring his patron Prince Esterhazy to change plans and return his Court nearer to Vienna, to enable the musicians to be closer to their families – the ‘Farewell Symphony' No. 45 in the extremely rare Key of F sharp Minor – in the last Movement, Haydn added an Adagio, whereby he gradually reduced the number of the instruments, to let his musicians snuff out their candles in turn one by one and leave the stage … until only Haydn and the First violin (Tomasini) were left to bow to the Prince, who was enlightened enough to get the joke and grant Haydn his polite political trade-unionist request …

Haydn seems to have pioneered the Jazzman’s act of joking with fellow musicians and audiences alike – a joyous ‘jokey’ ambiance among the classical Jazz music-improvisers on the stage is the mark of a great Jazz session. And Gondelman has plenty of it with his band-members who he really seems to love always as his children and frequently as siblings – he offers a glass of water to his exhausted drummer half his age … and ends his Sax-as-Clarinet playing of Cartola’s As Rosas Não Falam (=Roses Speak Not) on mere breath-exhalations – perhaps the complaint of a Shakespearean lover’s sighs ...

I am sure if Haydn was given the miraculous chance of returning to this planet as a jazz-man, he would have selected Leo Gandelman's body, whose surname suggests to me to be a corruption of the yiddish “Candle-man”.

On the famous Bossa Nova and its missing French Factor

I like the way Gandelman puns musically on Bossa Nova (=New Wave) everybody’s favourite Brazilian musical innovation, the very word and concept invented in the 19-fifties by the great Antonio Carlos (Tom) Jobim, pianist, guitarist, and composer, himself influenced by cool jazz referring to the harmonies of Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan.

Stan Getz, the American jazz saxophonist, caused a Bossa Nova craze throughout America in 1962 with his Jazz Samba album, which included among others Jobim’s musical meditations Desafinado and Meditation, hitting No 1 in the US charts. Desafinado even won a Grammy Award – Jobim himself was invited to perform the same year in New York's Carnegie Hall with Getz and Dizzy Gillespie.

Jobim had come to international attention in 1959, when the film Black Orfeus for which he had composed music (with the guitarist Luis Bonfa) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival, and then an Oscar the same year for the best foreign film.
One cannot forget the essential vital contribution rendered to Bossa Nova by the singer/ guitarist Joao Gilbert. I like the melodic and harmonic complexities, if and when they occur. I am not one for simplistic naïve art in our very complicated globalized lives. I feel no nostalgia for the fanciful good old simple life that never was – as long as human beings have been, are and shall be endowed with an all-consuming sexual passion, for the Woman as the child-bearer, there can never be a simple life.

Occasionally, Bossa Nova gets too diluted in its attempt to be all-inclusive, inducing a certain artificial Bourgeois-camp (New York style) nasality to its vocal twang, although one could search for the roots of this in the nasal vocals of the Brazilian rural cabaclo music.

In its time, under military boots, Bossa Nova was a commendable medium at integrating human and aesthetic limitations and inadequacies – Songs like Samba de una Nota So (= Samba of a single Note) is a case in point, as all sambas are of a single note … and excitingly Desafinado (=out of Tune) and syncopated, but most certainly always erotic A Garota de Ipanema (=To the Ipanema Girl) – obviously autobiographical, as Jobim (its composer) was born in Rio de Janeiro, but grew up in Ipanema – a neighbouring town on the sun-drenched beach.

What astounds me is the fact that no musicologist hitherto seems to have cottoned onto the historical reality (distracted by the above-mentioned Stan Getz publicity stunt in the USA) that the major influence on the Brazilian Bossa Nova must have come from the sound-tracks of the innovative French film-making known precisely by the same words in French the Nouvelle Vague (=New Wave).

The significance of this un-acknowledged cinematic (musical) fact is that the innovative French style was itself unwittingly trying to find a new visual language to express the emotional anxieties caused by the huge intellectual upheavals brought about by French Existentialism (of Jean Paul Sartre) – an immediate result was the sudden increase in youth-suicide rates listening to the sweetly depressive songs of Juliette Greco … To my ears the french-y lilt of Jobim’s Ipanema Girl is a perfect fit for any Jean Luc Goddard film!

Time for Musical Change

Leo Gandelman displays a healthy attitude to the venerated Sacred Cow of modern Brazilian music by endlessly punning teasingly on the concept and its themes – Bari Bossa, Bossa Rara, but never Nova!)

To begin with, he eliminates its nasal vocals – he could have kept them if he really wanted to – Leo can and would do anything if he feels it is right for his musical purpose.

More like a super nova he sucks his audience into his own world of Bossa Rara inspired by the heavy rain falling on his window panes in Rio, improvising a series of musical variations on themes by William Magalhaes and Juliano Zanoni, but also sophisticated Miles Davis and Europeanized New York, even jumping to Hollywood Pink Panther … juggling all the time to stay rhythmically more Afro-Euro US jazz than Brazilian candomblé.

I agreed entirely with Leo's conjecture that Ary Barroso may be the future of Brazilian Jazz – I would add Jazz-rock-and-heavy-metal fusion, futuristic (in the meaning of the Italian art-term), brilliantly proven by Gandelman and his Band’s rendering of Barroso’s remarkable composition Na Baixa do Sapateiro. It seems to amalgamate astonishingly all of the rich rhythms of the Brazilian world from the native Indian highlands down to the African beach towns, the flamenco of the colonialist masters, and the … prairie-American hamburger-growing ranchers.

Most of all, there is the heaving bossa (=wave) of a post-modern Metropolis, with its futuristic inner dynamo running relentlessly, like a train in perpetual motion, fatefully and perhaps fatally.

There is an overall rhythmic ‘mathematical’ constant in Barroso’s composition, a metronomic, machine-running dynamo-driving rock-beat, hammering throughout, typical of the restless White North American on an ethereal eternal journey traversing the vast prairies from one end of the (East) coast to the other (in the West) driving an old Oldsmobile or a Buick ...

Very interestingly, Barroso’s seemingly US-inspired post-modernism was anticipated by Baden Powell – Canto de Ossanha rooted in native Brazilian grounds, inspired by the complex poetic tapestries of Vinicius de Moraes (a remarkable English translation by Nadia Kerecuk that preserves the linguistic complexity of the original).

Baden Powell – not the British inventor and founder of the global Scout Movement, but a most famous Brazilian composer, whose father having been Brasilia’s Scout-master had named his son to honour his British idol, this Brazilian Powell’s Canto was converted by Gandelmn’s Band into a greater masterpiece I think, more compact than Barroso’s slightly indulgently stretched Na Baixa.

But of course with a consummate creative virtuoso like Leo Gandelman, there can be no minor work – everything he touches, turns to 24 carat gold. He loves and lives Music – his grand passion. His variations on the world-famous Brazilian melody Tico Tico (by Zequinha de Abreu – incidentally, a surname meaning Hebrew) recorded by many, including the inimitable Carmen Miranda (Chico Chico in Americanized spelling), drove Gandelman’s audience simply Bacchus-mad!

It is when he left the stage to play all over the hall for the audience members, that they jumped to their feet and went wild with dancing and clapping and almost lap-dancing in the first row like ancient Bacchanals … all the while Leo’s deep love for humanity shining brilliant through them all, breathing on and bathing them in sheer happiness.

I have witnessed nothing like it.

I think Leo Gandelman and his Band should be taken up by the United Nations as Ambassadors of good will, to travel the world all year round, to bring joy to the masses as Brasilia’s gift to mankind for Soul, joy, peace and happiness, beyond and above all inhuman sordid politics that kills the human soul.

Leo Gandelman and his mates can re-incarnate the dead souls.

And that is the magnificent Miracle of virtuoso Music-Making.

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Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2007-12-02T16:29:00.000-08:00

Hamilton de Holanda and Cheo Hurtado

2 Grand Masters of Making Music

First Festival of Brazilian Music in London [ii]

at Venezuela's Bolivar Hall

And the first night of the First Festival of Brazilian Music (1 November, 2007, 7.30 pm - at Venezuela’s cultural centre in London} exploded with a Big Bang of immense creativity.

Complex Overlaps and overlapping Complexities

As the Chavezian revolutionary Democracy is breaking-up the oligarchy of the South American political elites (with hands in North American pockets), it is simultaneously forging patriotic (not, ‘nationalist’) multi-ethnic cultures typical of the South American continent. And herein is embedded their original power and creative strength. The South American countries, more than ever, shall come out as ‘national’ cultures in harmony with each other, precisely because their genuine historical multi-ethnicity constitutes their common ground, blossoming and expanding, truly globalizing their creative impetus, unlike the racist, mutually destructive, ultra-nationalism fostered by Fascist regimes – like that of the mentally unbalanced (I think – later proved by his suicide in 1954) President Getúlio Vargas. The fascist use of multi-culturalism is a ‘nationalist’ abuse, a form of collective rape of the ethnic group that produces it – like Vargas, suddenly getting the ‘brilliant’ marketing idea of stealing and promoting the African-rooted samba as a Brazilian-national cultural symbol, while perpetuating the White supremacy by treating the poverty-ridden Blacks of the country as Second class-citizens.

Vargas was mad like that; proud to be a Mussolini aficionado (like Mosley's Jew-bashing Black Shirts of Britain), yet he would declare for the Allies in the Second World War, merely because he was annoyed by the hyperactivity of Hitler’s agents in Brazil …

Genuine egalitarian multi-culturalism in South America now given a second life by the Chavezian revolutionary impetus could only emerge in Brazil in the late 19-sixties through the immense efforts of young music-makers warmly known as the Tropicalistas, fighting for creative and societal freedoms, sustained by the masses who were their audiences. Led by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, after their return from exile in London, these musicians consciously sought out and forged egalitarian respect for the cultural products of all the ethnic groups constituting the tapestry of the Brazilian people, organizing ‘liberational’ music festivals under the general title of Tropicália.

It is almost a divine gift and a privilege in London to be a contemporary witness at the cauldron of creativity of the resurgent multi-ethnic brew being made at the Bolivar Hall. The peoples of South America are all the world’s inhabitants in one – from the Mayas, down to the African slaves, and the ignorantly labeled ‘red Indians’ in between (hugely genocided out of their land by the “Pilgrim Fathers”).

And here is an overlapping complexity a genocidal killer-idiot from the CIA School of Americas could never understand;

In reciprocation for the kindness of lending them the Bolivar Hall, the Brazilians had invited one of … Venezuela’s great music-makers, to switch on the powerful lights for their Brazilian music – an act of practical Socialist brotherhood if ever there was one.

And what an excellent choice of a star musician than Asdrúbal Cheo Hurtado – a grand master of the mandolin, the guitar, the tres, the bandola guayanesa, and double bass, but most of all the cuatro, a toy-like contraption very much emerging as the ‘national’ instrument of the Bolivarian-Chavezian Venezuela.

Cuatro is half a traditional Guitar. Its name meaning ‘4’ in Spanish is thought to refer to its 4 strings, half the number of its mother-instrument. But I think there is a clever little folk-pun on the word meaning a quarter – a quarter-instrument that is really half a size – a complex ‘proletarian’ joke not for the dim-witted US killers. The great Armenian composer Komitas used to say; “Tcharern miyain yerk tchunin” = only evil people lack songs = cannot sing, they cannot produce music. Hitler was Wagner-mad – the Nazis produced some kind of ‘classical’ copy-cat sculpture/architecture, but definitely could not produce a composer!

It is important to note that, of limited technical capacity, the cuatro is obviously a poor man’s guitar, more percussive than melodic. The massively exploited, highly-strung, are forced onto the move continuously, merely to survive, they have no leisure time to sit in a space they can call home (if they had a shack they could call their own) to relax and listen to … Baroque melodies – a dynamic cuatro is more than enough for their needs.

But not for Cheo Hurtado – in his hands, and as evidence of his creative genius – a tribute to the good (not evil) man’s musical genius transcending time and class, the cuatro becomes … all the various instruments Hurtado knows how best to play, including the classical Spanish guitar (of the immortal Andre Segovia).

The cuatro is played with bare fingers (and fist!), not with a plectrum. Hurtado’s Right hand is a miracle of … speed. You have seen nothing like it! His breathtaking percussionist climactic crescendos are a sight to behold, never mind to listen to … The wonder is that his instrument does not break as Hurtado definitely breaks the boundaries of cuatro music.

I missed though in Hurtado’s repertoire a deeper, darker, and a more melodic range in the revolution of the instrument that he is affecting. He should occasionally restrain his technical percussionist wizardry and bring to life the darker tunes of Venezuelan music. There is too much of a revolutionary joy in Hurtado’s music-making, even though his looks do betray a certain existential sadness typical of all deeply creative people. For a sensitive human soul, even the life-enhancing revolutionary joy can never override the emotion of profound tragedy felt at the thought of existential mortality. The display of such melancholy is anwyay technically vital to highlight the spiritual joy portrayed by the other side of the existential coin. Joyous celebration does need the occasional tragic sadness to relieve it.

Hamilton de Holanda Vasconcelos Neto is the Brazilian master of the mandolin played with a plectrum – a physical disciplinary inhibition (compared to the full hand-use on the cuatro) which Hamilton transcends effortlessly. A Renaissance instrument of limited potential, Hamilton has transformed the mandolin into almost a … Grand Piano! And not only because he has consciously extended its polyphonic potential by adding an extra string (low C) for a total of 10.

Capitalism vs Musical Socialism

Wearing sable tinted Levis, Hamilton walked onto the stage as if from under an American 1930’s Oldsmobile, with his little-mandolin instead of an oil-can – mechanic garage-chic … bolshie towards Hurtado, determined to knock him out in a musical mating game … But something extraordinary happened, of such uniqueness, un-repeatable, that I wish everyone I love was there to have experienced it; Hamilton’s ‘capitalist’ musical aggression was slowly but surely won over by Hurtado’s patient musical … socialism, which caused a massive creative miracle.

When the two petite-instruments finally achieved musical equality and brotherhood, their master music-makers produced such intensely passionate music of such profound humanity and sheer energetic life-force that it left one stunned – incredible crescendos with impossible precision of pitch, and crystal-clarity of musical diction … They shot the audience with rocket-speed (Japanese bullet-trains?) over the moon, in sheer unadulterated existential happiness.

I am certain such culturally mixed-music – Brazilian ‘Portuguese’ with Venezuelan ‘Spanish’ – reflects planetary motion. People usually forget that we live on a planet which turns around the Sun in unimaginable speed every second of a minute, to which is owed our daily life on earth.

Hamilton plays with all of his body and all over the place. Initially, I thought he would even walk all over the audience … Music drips from his music-soaked physique.

Yet this bull of a man in a musical china shop, helped by Hurtado’s musical kindness, could transform himself instantly to a most gentle giant of unusual compassion, all-giving, all-sharing the moment he called his orchestra onto the stage.

And what an orchestra of first-class musicians; André Lopes de Vasconcellos, electric guitar; Daniel Santiago, acoustic guitar; Márcio Bahia, drums; and last but foremost the unexpected co-star to Hamilton’s mandolin is Gabriel Grossi’s chromatic harmonica, rendering the formation of the Band conceptually totally original. Gabriel holds the American prairie-instrument in his mouth perched (like a favela …) a-top a microphone in his left hand, and plays (with the right hand) like a Blues-singer, on a par with Hamilton’s mandolin.

Gabriel Grossi ‘s harmonica sound usually emerges as a lonely voice, as haunting as Modest Mussorgsky’s delicate and highly civilized melody played out of the harsh cacophony of the barbaric nature of a Night on the Bare Mountain (1867), here, in the Hamilton de Holand Quintet surfacing frequently from the oceanic depths imaged by Márcio Bahia’s tympani.

Márcio Bahia, looking like an olive-oiled Turkish wrestler, is a hard-rock Drummer in every sense of the words – I had never heard such petrifying (puns intended!) sounds of cold stone, with heavy-metal hammers, mining massive pieces of musical rock, as if to re-build Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem …

With elaborate rock-band psychedelic stage-lighting, Márcio Bahia could scare the pants off the female members of the audience! He is a one-man rhythmical cement-mixer, holds everything together, and is not even a show-off … He kills you with the power of his stone-age music.

The Hamilton de Holanda Quintet illustrates the remarkable South American revolutionary musical innovation that needs to be urgently globalized – Brazilians and Venezuelans seem uninhibited in orchestrating the most unusual instruments into harmonious ensembles of contrapuntal polyphony.

Endowed with a towering height, Hamilton’s musical fusion with his orchestra is so noble and giving and loving (non-diva like …) that he physically seems to melt away in amongst the average heighted music-makers of his group, although his solo appearance seemed quite the reverse, and rightly so (I am all for the British-style mixed economy actively imitated by the Chinese Communists ...)

There is no doubting Hamilton’s strong egalitarian bond with his musicians, to which was owed the intense beauty of the music created about a large Brazilian animal called the Ant-Eater – Hamilton’s emphasis (in his verbal explanation) on the “little”- ness of the ants was significant and indicative of its ample reflection in the music – a clash of complex contrasting rhythmic patterns woven contrapuntally in harmonies that could explode the cavernous Royal Albert Hall.

Hamilton the Great came to his own yet again for the last encore of the evening – In an act of extraordinary socialist fraternal graciousness, he invited the most civilized Cheo Hurtado back onto the stage to accompany him in a masterly interpretation – a series of wonderful variations on Besame Mucho. It left me in no doubt whatsoever that Hamilton must be a great lover of Johann Sebastian Bach – the Jehovah of all music.

Even if Hamilton himself would belie me, I couldn’t and wouldn’t believe him.
I long to hear one day live, his interpretations of Bach and even perhaps Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart … I would hop on a plane to Brazil for it – provided of course that there won’t be yet another junta burning down the Amazon forests to fatten the American hamburger-eaters.

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Ideas that Enlighten and Change Your Mind

Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2007-11-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

First Festival of Brazilian Music in London [i]
at Venezuela’s Bolivar Hall

*

Something new is forging ahead in Brazil. An amalgam of new socio-political creative forces is in the fore – a brand new bossa nova (= new wave) forming in Chavezian Venezuela is engulfing South America. It needs a new form of art-criticism. This is an attempt at such.

It is no more possible to sit back in a genteel concert-hall and pontificate rigidly and frigidly upon a worn-out interpretation of a Beethoven Sonata, even if it were The Appassionata.

Mono-instrumental virtuosity in the classical West shall have to live cheek-by-jowl now with multi-layered polymathic musicianship; the new master music-makers of bursting multi-ethnic cultures are polymath instrumentalists.

Socio-political Meditations

For a country (Brazil) half the size of a whole continent (South America), and the 9th largest economy in the world, to have its very … 1st Music Festival concert in London is “passing strange” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet would have it …

We should really have celebrated by now a Golden jubilee of Brazilian Art-festivals, not its first. The classically minded Armenians say ush lini - anush lini = let it be late, but only if it be sweet! The equivalent in Portuguese of mais vale tarde que nunca = but better late than never!

Still, the fact needs a theoretical explanation which led me to a series of meditative thoughts –

Brazil possesses a miraculous wealth of (not only Gold and industrial raw materials – the target of the Miami-mafia driven corrupt politicians in US pockets) but also the rich tapestries of multi-ethnic cultures, all interweaving as powerfully as the electrically charged neurons of the active human brain.

There is nothing on this earth like the country of Brazil.

It contains the largest population of Black people outside Africa, and the largest Diaspora of Japanese people, in addition to pre-literate groups of people (still referred to as ‘primitive’ by some) – known (like the Yanomami and the Piraha), and still unknown hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforests, which are truly the lungs of this planet Earth – its destruction is everybody’s business, and not only the despicable ranchers of the Brazilian political elite flushing them down the Hamburger guts of the American toilets.

Replenishing the devastated rainforests of Brasilia must be crucial in the global fight to save our lives on this planet.

If the Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva meant every word he uttered at the Plenary Session in New York of the 61st United Nations General Assembly (on 19th September 2006, and I urge you to read it) http://www.brazil.org.uk/newsandmedia/speeches_files/20060919.html

then the rest of us in the world must feel grateful to the Brazilian people for the collective wisdom of electing him as their president (only last year) for a 2nd term of office. Lula da Silva seems to be the first incorruptible President of Brazil, without any strings attached to US / CIA government-puppets.

Unfortunately, President Lula and his supporters in the world, have no time to waste, neither the world can afford to wait – he better quicken his Nelson Mandela-type evolutionary laid-back rhythm and join forces with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez to affect true Bolivarian revolutionary changes in the world, towards the realization of the 3 simple principles of, not Marxism, but … the French Revolution that still have the power to save life on earth from Climate Change;

Egalité= Social Equality

Fraternité = Brother-and-Sisterhood of man-and-womankind that leads to social mobility, the corner-stone of Meritocracy as the post-modern paradigm of the social structure overriding skin-colour and class-stratification

Liberté = Freedom, as a fundamental and vital human right, and not a luxury given by post-modern slave-mongers like the ex-imperialist governments of the West.

The whole of South America needs to be liberated from the economic strangulation of the United States governments.

See what the latter are doing (still!) to miniscule Cuba – subjugating it for 4 decades now to economic genocide they call it ‘Sanctions’, while simultaneously trying to explode Fidel Castro’s … beard!

Fidel Castro is Simon Bolivar re-incarnate, and he shall be heeded to by the masses of the poor at all times even after his unthinkable natural demise.

Yes, incredibly, the whole of South America had been enslaved by the American governments since the end of the First World War in vicious replication of the Spanish and Portuguese imperialisms, in envious competition with the British Empire and the latter’s ‘ownership’ of India, Australia, and most of Africa.

Cuba, pre-Castro was a Mafia-brothel for the Miami rich. The genocidal US economic sanctions against Castro’s Cuba are the shame of the UN subservience to the US. Little Cuba shall remain America’s Achilles Heel, until the gangrenous legs of the North American giant are amputated by the likes of Hugo Chavez (Bolivarian President of Venezuela) and Evo Morales (‘Red Indian’ President of Bolivia) and hopefully Lula da Silva (The Trade Unionist shoe-shine President of Brasilia).

Corrupt Politicians and their Culture

What is a "corrupt politician"? Simple really – s/he is a brazen compulsive Liar of the first magnitude.

The great William Shakespeare had defined it perfectly in Hamlet’s words referring to his murderous uncle – “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” – a very American marketing definition indeed … And their culture?

Corrupt politicians are philistine swine – their genocidal culture is that of Las Vegas money- launderers; Prostitution and Drugs.

And Brazil until last year had god’s plenty of them – As late as the 1990s, special Police death-squads were formed in Rio de Janeiro shooting parentless homeless street-children dead, as a means of cleaning up the city… while the Creole ranchers stuffed North American gullets with hamburgers, and luscious Black Brazilian women escorts, with the most incredibly beautiful African Bottoms became the www porno Queens of the world wide web.

Brazil needed and found its first kosher president (in Lula da Silva) to mine for (to use trendy Business-discourse) and dig the priceless riches of its true creative culture – no wonder then the joint enterprise with the Chavezian Venezuelans involved with similar efforts manifest at the Bolivarian Hall in London, where all concerts are FREE.

I am hoping that the day shall come (very soon?) when the 3-day Brazilian Music Festival evolves into a month-long Festival of multi-ethnic culture, where else but in multi-ethnic London.

I would love to hear one day (for example) Os Escravos (= The Slaves), spoken by the great humanitarian British Shakespearean actor Paul Scofield; written in 1883, by Antonio De Castro Alves, famous in his own time (and ahead of the British Abolitionists … ) as the “poet of the slaves”. There is nothing like it in Britain’s abolitionist culture, nor anything like Tiradentes (1746-1792), a hero of the Brazilian Republicanism, who planned a University, and modern … social services once rid of Portuguese imperialism.

If the Portuguese imperialist genociders had not hanged and quartered Tiradentes (=tooth-puller=dentist) in public in Rio de Janeiro (April 1792), he may have created the world’s first National Health Service; and the unacceptable inhumanity of the shanty towns (the notorious favelas) may never have arisen.

Musical Meditations on Culture

Superficially, people I know identify Brazilian music with Copacabana Beach-belles sexualized for the delectation of the Miami American impotent millionaires and their mafia gamblers. Everyone of my generation would have heard the catchy tune of the beach-y song Besame Mucho (=Kiss me! A lot!), performed from Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Charles Aznavour down to Placido Domingo and … the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The No 1 hit was not even Brazilian, but Mexican, if such typicality could be claimed, as the song was one of the first cases of world music – easy on the ears, non-descript light music canned for the bored receptionists of posh hotels throughout the Western world dreaming of Copacabana beach romance.

The beautifully named Consuelo Velazquez, a Mexican teenager had written it (in 1940) before turning 16 herself – critics were surprised to discover that she had not been kissed by then … when in fact precisely because she had not, that she wanted it passionately in her song! The more interesting point is that she was inspired by an aria in a Spanish opera by Enrique Granados. I myself think Besame’s popularity may be owed to the sunny flavour of the Italian Neapolitan songs popularized by Mario Lanza.

There cannot be a soul in the world who has not heard of the Rio Carnival, and the African originated, percussion-dominated people’s samba (imitated annually in London’s Notting Hill Gate). Samba-s were possession-dances, noticeable even in the jerky movements of their much diluted Ballroom dancing versions – what the BBC punters think are modern sexy teases. Various bateria (=drums) manifest the complex wide-and-wild ranging fertility rhythms of different gods in Nature.

The Argentinean originated tango on the other hand, that outraged the puritanical hypocrisies of the 1912 United States when first introduced there, is grounded in a complex combination of ‘taking’ inventive variations of long steps and instant postures – very Spanish 16th century aristocratic peacocks … enhanced by syncopated dotted rhythms (of 2/4 and 4/4) rooted in the … Cuban habanera.

The history of the Iberian Peninsula is complex - long before the Spaniards and Portuguese formed as separate ethnic nations, the Muslim Moors owned it - and their historical record is just being re-discovered, after a deliberate loss by the Christian genociders from France.

The Spanish ruling Arsitocracy treated the Portuguese as their lower orders - this historical fact can be detected in their subsequent linguistic fossils - the Spanish language imitated the delicate soft phonemes of the French aristocracy, while the Portuguese pronounciation is soaked in 'roughage', further rough-ed up in the colonies of Brazil. However much the Portuguese patriots may disagree, I must say that historically speaking, the Portugese language may be a dialect of the Spanish language.

Borrowing a linguistic metaphor, I would further suggest that musically the Argentinean tango is a Dialect of the Brazilian samba (no offence meant to Argentinean patriots!).

It is impossible not to think of many South American musical forms simultaneously, when thinking of the Brazilian samba, tango, candomble, maxixe, choro etc., of the fact that South America is really a whole hot world on its own, needs to unite as a federative Union – just as the Brazilian civil state itself is constituted – to release its immense, boiling and bubbling multi-cultural creativity, by liberating itself first of all from the North American economic domination, I call the Slavery to the US.

With Gilberto Gil now as President Lula’s Minister of Culture, a Black musician to his core – and I do intend a pun on the Spanish corazon = heart, spirit – once imprisoned by one of those endless vicious CIA-trained Brazilian military juntas – Gil had escaped to London to save his Caribbean skin … now back in Brazil, and in power, one hopes he can initiate a resurgence of Brazilian multi-ethnic culture as a whole, and not only of its mystical music.

O How I long to hear the likes of Bachianas Brasileiras by the incomparable (and prolific – he produced 2,000 works) Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), without whose very existence the unique Frenchman Jacques Loussier’s glorious jazzed-up Bach would not have been born.

With such thoughts in mind, swimmingly in a stream of consiousness - onto the First Night of the First Brazilian Music Festival in London, at Venzuela’s Bolivar Hall;

1 November, 2007, 7.30 pm. [to be cont.]

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Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2007-08-18T06:26:00.000-07:00

Superbly Dramatic and Dramatically Superb

Myrna Moreno as the Old Lady in Lord Byron's Love Letters - R. D. Bamfield

Myrna Moreno is a remarkable mezzo-soprano, with almost a baritonal middle range, as if born to sing intense Oratorios.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle was labeled a “walking Encyclopaedia” … one could similarly characterize Miss Moreno as a ‘walking Oratorio’!

Miss Moreno’s appearance on even a simply lit stage is so powerfully dramatic, so intensely tragic in the most grandiose sense of the word that she appears like a sacred ritual matriarchal icon, the likes of which one only encounters in the plays of the great Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca.

Miss Moreno has an excellently developed sense of her dramatic operatic vocal potential – she selects her repertoire perfectly. For her solo concert [on 6 June 2007] accompanied perfectly on the Piano by Miss Diana Wright, at the Bolivar Hall (the cultural centre of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in London), Miss Moreno seems to have focused on displaying her considerable vocal range upwards from the lower registers – unfortunately with music that rarely allowed the flow of her two (top and middle) ranges smoothly into one another – instead, even though the tones were made full complex use of, but they mostly stayed separate, shining like brilliant but individual diamonds. I longed for songs that would flow together and burst the shores of Miss Moreno's vocal range.

I was not happy with her accents when she sang in different languages. As a perfectionist, and familiar with eleven languages, I cannot condone the received idea that classical Singers should be forgiven their linguistic inadequacies compensated for by the beauty of their tones …

I insist that Ravel’s Chanson Francaise should not sound like his Chanson Hebraique, and both sound like his Chanson Espagnole – even though I do not mind the fact that this latter may echo Bizet’s Carmen …

The sensation, nay, inspiring Revelation of the concert evening was Miss Moreno’s introduction of the Venezuelan Antonio Esteves (1916-1988), a most remarkable Song writer of intense tragic sentiment, unheard of in London concert halls.

Myrna Moreno as The Secretary in The Consul - G.C. Menotti

I have now lived in London for four decades, and I have not heard anything like this composer’s extraordinary recitative-like narrations of heavily symbolical tonal tapestries, which Miss Moreno performs to Christ-like perfection;

Here comes the man from Mariguitar
Last night he went fishing

Singing he went to sea
And at Dawn came back dead

Miss Moreno petrifies you with her vocal magical expressionism! You dare not breathe, in case you wake the dead in her Esteves song (Polo Doliente).

A hundred puzzles get carved on Miss Moreno’s visage, midstream while singing – ultimately perhaps about life and death. They need answers that Antonio Estevez does not provide in musical resolutions – He articulates Death with Major Key(s) – with intense fury, instead of the sweet melancholic Minor Keys one is accustomed to in post-Baroque European classical Music.

In El Ordenador = milking-song where the cows are called, Miss Moreno converts her recitative middle line into an almost oratorical contralto;

The Virgin of Sorrows is coming to visit you
“Carro de Oro”

thus persisting with and preserving the purity of her upper Soprano-line – the two lines never dripping (like milk) into one another;

Up there in the hills I have a clear well
Where the Virgin washes her little feet and face
“Nube blanca”

Myrna Moreno as Ana in The Seven Deadly Sins - Kurt Weil

Antonio Esteves deserves global recognition. The true worth of his music can only unfold itself in the art and craft of a consummate artist like Miss Moreno, whose intensely tragic sense of existential being (= Life) seems to be well-tuned and in perfect harmony with the composer’s.

Antonio Esteves is nothing like Schubert, but everything like the Armenian classical composer Komitas (1869-1935), who was arrested in Istanbul (in 1915) by the government of the Young Turks, as one of two hundred fifty intellectual leaders of the Armenian community,
to be killed – the signal shot of the genocide of a 'headless' million Armenians that followed it.

Komitas was well-known in Berlin, as a Founding member of the academic International Musical Society – probably the first of its kind in the world. His life was spared, but not his witnessing of the genocidal deeds.

As a direct result of the inhuman horrors, Komitas fell ... silent, lost his mind, and never uttered a word, literally, for another twenty years, breathing his last in an Asylum in Paris.

The great Claude Debussy had heard his music, and said of Komitas’ masterpiece Groonk=crane (the bird; the Hermes-type of Messenger in Armenian culture), which expressed musically the variations of the bird-in-flight, while the lyrics sang of the Refugee’s longing for his hearth, that if Komitas had composed nothing else but that song, he could have been regarded as one of the great composers of all time.

I wonder if Antonio Esteves had somehow heard the Komitas song referred to by Debussy, whose music he must have known most certainly.

How I wish that one day both composers – the Venezuelan and the Armenian – are performed together in the same program for an evening of exceptional musical experience.

*

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Prof Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2007-07-31T11:34:00.000-07:00

A Unique Concert of Well-Timed Truths

at the London Barbican

*

David Barsamian is a Good American (and an Armenian) – in fact, an excellent one – the best manifestation of American decency, compassion, and classless egalitarianism – a rare species indeed nowadays in a world polluted, devastated and on the verge of global destruction because of US corporate imperialism.

George Bush junior – twice the fraudulently selected non-elected President of America succeeded in converting the American State into the most hated in the world, rendering it practically impossible for Good Americans like David Barsamian to tell another story – that of American love of egalitarian Democracy and Renaissance humanism.

Barsamian could remind people in the world that it was the American citizenry that battled hard to destroy their governmental destroyers of the Vietnam – the pity of it is that the new generation of the American citizenry have not yet woken up to do the same to the destroyers of Iraq – alas, alack, Poor Yorick …

Barsamian is the Founder and Director of Alternative Radio – a bold brave broadcasting unit, speaking the truth about things weekly from the clean-air Mountains of Colorado (USA). He alone in America dares give a voice to the much-reviled Prophet adored in Europe, Professor Noam Chomsky, who solo in the USA dares castigate the lies, the damned lies and the endless lies of the American Governments and their imperialist agenda for permanent world-domination – defined by the Pentagon illiterates as “Full Spectrum Dominance”!

Barsamian is not your typical brash and loud motor-mouth American radio-man with inane jokes and smutty hot-air – Barsamian possesses European intelligence and quiet refinement. He is also creatively innovative – he had the brilliant idea of producing for Londoners (at the Barbican Arts Centre – 28th July 2007, 7.30 pm) a unique “Radio-show” on a ... theatre-stage, beautifully designed and lit by Laurence Neff, with first-class sound production by the audio engineer Brian Mohr.

Birds of a feather flock together – they absolutely must to deface the tarted-up face of inhuman capitalism. The excellent Barsamian had the equally excellent idea of inviting to the podium a most articulate intellectual, one of Britain’s rare and unique truth-speakers, Tariq Ali, to talk to him about the vast problems of this wretched world re-barbarized, re-nuclearized and re-missiled by the Mafia of the US neo-Cons.

With straight questioning and up-front answering, together, bravely and boldly where no right-wingers wish to hover, David and Tariq weaved a sharply observed tapestry of world events, displaying the horrible images of poverty, neglect, disease, sheer inhumanity caused directly by the exploitation of the world’s peoples – the starving masses, devastated by high-powered ruling elites, greedy and totally corrupt in every meaning of those words.

Tariq and David took us on a journey going from America to China, passing through Pakistan and India, returning to the Middle East – the Palestinian suffering and the Nazi policies of Israel acting as the client- state for the US socio-political oligarchy (my words, not theirs). They were on the cusp of reaching Africa, when time ran out …

Perhaps the show should have been scheduled for two performances – and made more available to Londoners – the world’s most expensive city, indeed, with 12 English Pounds and 50 pence for the cheapest tickets!

Why O why, No Concessions for the students, unemployed, and the Pensioners? – Because they would constitute most of the audience?

No one who could afford paying £20 for a single ticket, plus all the accouterments – transport, food and drink – would possess the brain-interest to attend such a show anyway …

Politics and Music is another of Barsamian’s formulae that manifested itself perfectly this night – and what better choice than the great human-rights concerned Kronos Quartet.

Concert sophisticates are universally made to suffer collective amnesia by the music-world elites (subservient to the political oligarchs) about the profound links of

classical music to day-to-day socio-political events;

The greatest, Johann Sebastain Bach lost a job in a Church because he had the ‘folly’ of entertaining a girl-friend on the job! Mozart’s operas mocked at the sexual peccadilloes of the upper-classes and their hypocritical ‘Christian’ morality. Beethoven was furious with Napoleon’s conversion from a French revolutionary Liberator to a tuppeny Tyrant.

Schoenberg’s insistence on including every half-tone of the scale and imparting to them equal value and worth was an act of egalitarian Socialism and the destruction of centuries old classical musical hierarchies!

All praise to Kronos Quartet, with virtuosi players – with the most perfect holder of the base line I have yet encountered (Jeffrey Ziegler cello), valuably voluble viola (Hank Dutt), sweetly mournful ‘second’ violin (John Sherba), led by the gloriously learned ‘first’ violin David Harrington, a musicologist of the first order, and uniquely heartwarmingly humane!

They have transformed their traditional instruments electronically into communicative-media of every sort, able to produce every imaginable sound, occasionally helping themselves of other instruments and even their own human voices – they play world-music globally – global music worldly-wise.

But even they, the timeless Kronos – the first god of classical Greek mythology – can occasionally slip-up – their mythological namesake used to swollow his new born children annoying his wife, Gaia=mother Earth, who did all the child-bearing!

The absence of a printed program with background information for a concert cannot be right for post-modern tastes. It gives the impression of penny-pinching and deceit on behalf of a rip-off Management.

To do it in the name of musical Improvisation is even worse; Absolute improvisation in the professional performing arts (even in Jazz) is a gimmicky nonsense, as professionals (especially the virtuosi) develop over time their own (Plato’s) world of forms and structures while creating a personal repertoire.

As a connoisseur of Kronos Quartet, I could detect the items played, like their arrangement of a love-song by the Lebanese female star Feyrooz, married to one of the Rahbani Brothers whose music she sings exclusively throughout the Middle East; the Bollywood love-song mehbooba mehbooba = O My Beloved, immortalized by Asha Bhosle, the Bollywood film star married to the composer of the song, the late R.D. Burman. Miss Bhosle is thought to have recorded more than 12,000 songs … Still – I would have loved to have had a printed program with Notes by the learned Mr Harrington, whose writing is always a joy to read.

The Program opened with the execution of the US National Anthem in the version of the late rock guitar virtuoso Jimi Hendrix – an extraordinary piece, which I think shall emerge eventually as one of the great musical compositions of all time – it is of course impossible to dissociate it from Hendrix’ own masterful performance of it. Hendrix played it on his eclectic electrical guitar, and the result is an inspired piece of inimitable perfection. He begins playing the American National Anthem, to variation it to eventual total destruction – an immensely complex work of extraordinary dissonant-harmonies, because I think Hendrix poured all of the anger and frustration of a whole people – the American nation, and his own racially abused Black people, against the military-industrial barbarism of the Vietnam War.

I think the Kronos Quartet should have left the Hendrix original alone. I appreciate that they produced very well the sheer ugliness, violence, and Genghis-Khan style of cacophonic aggression … but I feel they bulldozed the sophisticated complexities of the Hendrix piece, which is highly textured in rhythmic nuance, melodically refined while in gradual dissonant dilapidation and eventual cacophonic destruction of melody and rhythm – All …

They could have broadcast the Jimi Hendrix recording of it, or done better creative justice to the symphonic polyphony of the piece which Kronos is generally extremely competent at achieving otherwise.

I am afraid my reservation for Miss Wu Man’s pipa featuring the opening item of the Second Part of the evening is similar. Wu Man is a consummate virtuoso of the Chinese lute (the pipa) – no doubt about it. Her fingers swim like boneless eels and flow like the waves of a running river.

She played a most celebrated Chinese musical piece of great antiquity that has survived, titled The Great Ambush, usually learnt by ear in old China, passed on in performance from Master to Disciple – it began to be written down during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in a kind of notation using numbers. It is an ancient example of what I call ‘narrative music’ - otherwise called “programme-music” post-Strauss and his symphonic poem Don Juan, although a peak illustration could be served by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

The Chinese melody tells the story of a famous battle between two generals, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, won by Liu Bang, who then proceeds to found the Han dynasty (in 206 BC). The music represents a complex aggregate of textured sound, rhythmic proto-counterpoints with abrupt changes of tempo, imitative of a clash of body-armored armies, their spears and swords, and even the thuds of primitive cannon balls (the Chinese had already invented).

Miss Man is of course an unsurpassed master of exciting rapid strumming and twanged notes – I was therefore much perturbed when she inexplicably bull-dozed (American dumbing-down?) all complex, subtle, highly visual and onomatopoeic rhythmic variations – as if she suddenly got lazy and could not be bothered to scale the ancient depths of the piece, which is what the Kronos Quartet does famously and with great musicological panache.

In between, I agreed of course with every word Tariq Ali and David Barsamian uttered, filling the evening with thought-provoking ideas without a second of boredom setting in. Their up-to-the-minute well-informed analyses of world-events could not be bettered. But I wish that David Barsamian would not cast himself in the role of an interviewer, even though I appreciate it is his professional label – it plunges the interviewee into an unnecessary halo of superiority, when in fact Mr. Barsamian himself is every inch an equal – he aught to conduct his interviews as conversational Dialogues, rather than deferential monologues.

It could have been even more of an exciting evening if occasion was created for audience participation – like a phone-in – allowing members to make brief comments or put questions. Perhaps next time!

What was most heartwarming, after exposing all the miseries and wretchedness of our post-modern world of rampant globalization aka inhuman exploitation of the masses of the world from China to Palestine by the filthy rich getting unimaginably, mythically wealthier upon the dead bodies of millions and millions displaced and murdered in pointless imperialist wars, was the paean sang by Tariq Ali and David Barsamian of hope of an alternative world being created on the South American continent, against all the odds of evil American imperialist aggression and CIA terrorism – a truly peaceful revolution for true democracy and freedom through the Ballot Box, and not down US weapons of mass destruction, led by the true man-of-the-people, Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, re-elected last year with the 70% of his country’s vote, against America’s George Bush Junior, a fraudulent President if ever there was one, ruling the American roost via electoral fraud like a Banana Republic-an!

Evo Morales, scion of the ‘Red-Indian’ the Americans genocided 200 years ago in the North American continent, today is the democratically elected President of Bolivia, dedicated to improving the lot of his people much raped and massacred by the US military-industrial complex, as in all of South America from Colombia to Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Chavez and Morales, with Chomsky, John Pilger, Barsamian and Tariq Ali may yet defeat the evil American empire with their sheer Good, of human decency and compassion.

Long may they survive America’s satanic evil.

It is time that the poor of America – 50 million of them, join hands with the poor of the rest of the world to create another world more than possible – truly realizable as an actual global fact.

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Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian on Exceptional Music Concerts

2007-07-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

MAX MAXIMUS OPTIMUS

The month of April in 2005 was the month of Max (as the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies would like to be known) at London’s Royal Festival Hall (RFH).

Some shall disagree with me – some always do – but I am certain that Max is Britain’s greatest living composer, hence the Latin titles I have endowed him with … I am glad that at least Her Majesty the Queen agrees with me, having just had appointed him the Master of her [the Queen’s] Music.

Max is one of the most intensively formally educated men around – has studied Music in Manchester, Rome and at the Princeton University (USA). The sheer quantity let alone quality of his work is impressive.

I wish to focus here exclusively on his Symphony No. 8 – the Antarctic (premiered on 30th April, 2005 at the RFH), a symphonic poem against Pollution, which I think will emerge as the first great work of the 21st century music.

It proves yet again, that a composer with pure sounds as his palette, can nevertheless paint profoundly political themes (following Beethoven’s lead).

Musical inheritance detected in a composer’s work (otherwise labelled as ‘influences’, ‘references’, I call them - continuities) cannot be regarded as detrimental to the originalities of a composer’s own conceptions.

Of all the arts, especially in Music, continuities are essential to preserve an aristocratic (meaning 'classical') progeny that endures and leads to greatness. Repetition is the Soul of Music.

Max, thus, musically, is of the highest noble birth – I would say out of the wedlock of Wagner and Stravinsky, with some midwifery from Debussy!

I am no fan of later Stravinsky (Oedipus Rex – 1927), and especially dislike Wagner’s (1813-1883) oeuvre – incestuous, overstretched, macho racist absurdities (no wonder Hitler loved him), but I am passionate about Max’s own music produced in the last half a decade.

Stravinsky could not cope with his own volcanic originalities exploding in The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913), and went off-tangent into Collage and Neo-classical hot air (Pulcinella 1920). It is still a crux in Stravinsky scholarship as to why?

Wagner on the other hand, had difficulty finding his way back home to his tonics … even though incredibly, he became the greatest single influence on all music post-him – Strauss, Mahler, Sibelius, you name it, could not be born without his massive input.

But thank god for the failures of Wagner and Stravinsky – for here comes Max, and marries them off successfully in his music (the Antarctic Symphony) – evoluting their music the way they would have done, if only they could or knew how to … endowing their continuities with such rich and huge complexities, that the Wagnerian-Stravinskian originals in comparison sound like children playing …

Max has become an absolute master of complex orchestration. Debussy’s (1862-1912) music is illustrative, of some simple overall images (most famously La Mer=The Sea 1905). Max’s music on a parallel track (the Sea is crucial to Max’s music too – he lives drenched in it on Orkney Islands off Scotland) is profoundly, intensely, incredibly visual, almost on every phrase and cadence, more so than a symphonic poem by Strauss.

No other composer seems to me to possess such an extraordinary cinematic visuality – almost like a film-director, like a Fellini or Kurosawa. For this very same reason, I was appalled when the powers that be, forced on us the concert-goers at the RFH premiere of the symphony, projections on a huge screen of Max going on slow-motion walk-abouts among the icebergs of Antarctica, which made a nonsense of the unique visuality of his music – I had to shut my eyes throughout to focus on it ...

The ending of the Antarctic Symphony is a coup de theatre – it doesn’t end so much as it fades into the vastness of the universe, like a drop dripping from a stalactite off the edge of an iceberg.

It very much reminded me of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion – the Everest of Western Classical music – the ending of which is most unique in world music – a kind of Lullaby, as Jesus (murdered for and by our sins) sleeps in peace in his Father’s (not Mother’s) arms - Bach’s daring reversal of the maternal stereotype! - ready to wake up – for Resurrection. Bach’s music here, unending, merely fades into God’s universal space.

It remains for me to confirm that, besides being the great composer that he has become in the last half a decade - Max too had his ‘modern-music’ excesses earlier in his career - Max is also a very great writer of the English language, undiscovered yet – the Diary extracts of his Antarctic experience published in the programme prove it.

Finally, and incidentally, Max is also a first class raconteur filled with joie de vivre – having heard him, I can firmly say that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies could have been a great ... stand-up comic - the classical gentle kind - were he not the great composer that he is, and that, right at the start of our new 21st century.

On 24th April 2005, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies gave a magnificent lecture at the Royal Festival Hall concerning the present and the future of Music in Britain. He had no hesitation in decrying the evils of money-grabbing obsession and Globalization, causing massive soul-destruction globally – I myself would call it the US Imperialist Genocide of the Human Soul.

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