Extraordinary stuff!
The range of instruments
listed above will already have given the signal that this is
not an altogether standard early music recording. Since some
other sounds not listed – such as those of a pistol being fired,
a chain-saw in action and a car approaching and departing –
are also to be heard on this vividly recorded CD, it will be
gathered that “not altogether standard” rather understates the
case!
Not that you would
necessarily have any suspicions from the packaging – the usual
elegant white of Musique d’Abord releases and the name of Gregorio
Paniagua and the Atrium Musicae de Madrid on the front, and
a list of Latin titles on the back (most of which are Paniagua’s
invention).
La Folia is a dance
– which may actually be Portuguese, rather than Spanish, in origin
- whose harmonic framework was adopted and employed by composer
after composer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often
as the starting point for a set of variations. As early as 1623,
Piccinini published his ‘Partite variate sopra Folia’ though its
origins certainly lie earlier. Gregorio Paniagua’s booklet notes
say that the earliest mention of the dance cones in the ‘auto
de la Sibilla Cassandra’ by the Portuguese musician and poet Gil
Vicente. Jean-Baptiste Lully’s ‘Air des hautbois Les folies d'Espagne’
(1672) was fundamental to the later fashion for La Folia, a fashion
which shows no sign of stopping and which includes important contributions
by Corelli, Vivaldi, Geminiani, Sor, Paganini, Liszt etc. etc.
A huge website devoted to ‘La Folia’ (click here)
lists well over a hundred versions since 1970.
‘Folia’ is said
to derive from the Tuscan word ‘folle’, meaning foolish, strange,
mad. There’s a Spanish form of poem known as a folia – made
up of four lines of nonsense or absurdity. Such senses of the
word are certainly relevant to Paniagua’s own variations on
La Folia. In his booklet notes he seems to see the dance as
somehow symptomatic of an important aspect of the Spanish psyche:
“In Spain where all men are solitary, where everyone bears a
world within himself, where nothing is more universal than individuality,
where all men are filled with both darkness and light, where
there have been, and still are, very distant men, full of uncertainty
and of hope, madness takes root with quite extraordinary facility”.
Given such a vision,
we need not be so surprised at the nature of Paniagua’s treatment.
A variety of previous Folias – many of them anonymous and taken
from early manuscripts of Spanish music, a few better known,
such as ones by Pasquini and Gaspar Sanz – are subjected to
Paniagua’s remarkable musical imagination. These Folias are
mixed with, cross-fertilised with pieces from many other sources,
reinterpreted and commented upon in the light of other musical
idioms – ragas, electronics, jazz etc. The results are, as I
say, extraordinary. There are moments of beauty and moments
that seem wilfully bizarre; at times the results seem quite
funny, at others rather painfully disturbed. If there is such
a thing as musical surrealism – and it might be worth remembering
how important the Spanish contribution to surrealism was – then
this is surely a major contribution to the genre.
The original LP of
‘La Folia de la Spagna’ (Harmonia Mundi HMC 901050) was released
in 1982 and acquired a certain minor cult status, both amongst
audiophiles and amongst musicians. This CD reissue is welcome,
but unfortunately the extensive documentation present on the original
LP has disappeared – not least the detailed table of sources that
was provided in the original issue. Fortunately a version of this
has been provided on the web-site mentioned earlier (click here).
This is not recommendable
to, as they say, those of a nervous disposition, nor to early-music
purists. But those with a taste for the unusual, for music that
is effectively beyond all normal categories, will find much to
intrigue them here.
Glyn Pursglove
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Atrium Musicae de
Madrid: Gregorio Paniagua (guitar, jew’s harp, cromorne, viola da gamba,
vielle à roue), Eduardo Paniagua (recorders, jew’s harp), Daniel del Rio
(violin, pochette, tambour), Andreas Prittwitz (recorders, cromorne, clarinet),
Luis Paniagua (double bass, tabla, sitar, crotales, castanets, derbouka),
Albertina do Huete (harpsichord, xylophone, metallophone, grelots); Gregorio
Paniagua (director).
