To say that Joan Guinjoan is one of the senior figures of Catalan
- and Spanish - musical life is a simple truth, though like all
such statements it is in danger of sounding like the kind of faint
praise that mildly damns. Such statements can imply that the person
so described is terribly worthy, that he is respected in his advancing
years, but that the actual music he writes is of no particular
interest. In the case of Guinjoan any such implication would be
very wide of the mark. He is a fine composer, full of creative
wit, in the best sense, exploratory and stylistically diverse.
Born in Ruidoms,
a hazelnut and olive-oil producing town in the Baix Camp region
of the Spanish province of Tarragona, Guinjoan thus comes
from much the same area as did Antonio Gaudí; in his youth
he played the accordion at local festivals, before taking
up the piano. At the age of twenty he made his way to Barcelona,
studying at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Liceu
before, in 1952, moving to Paris and studying at the École
Normale de Musique. To this point, Guinjoan’s ambition was
to become a concert pianist but this desire was gradually
overtaken - as a result of his exposure to the musical life
of Paris - by a fascination with the new possibilities of
composition. He studied composition in Barcelona, with Cristofor
Taltabull, whose students also included Josep Soler and Xavier
Benguerel, and back in Paris at the École Normale, with Jean-Etienne
Marie. In Paris in the early 1960s he was a regular at the
concerts of the Le Domaine Musical, under the direction of
Pierre Boulez. Returning to Barcelona he soon established
himself as a composer and since then has gone on to win many
an award, to direct and conduct some significant ensembles,
to run festivals, to write extensively, collect honorary degrees
and be awarded membership of various distinguished academies.
But to turn to
Guinjoan’s music itself. It is various in both genre and style.
The major works include the Tres piezas par clarinete solo
(1969) and the extraordinary Magma of 1971, for a sixteen
instrument ensemble and written as a tribute to the Barcelonese
painter August Puig; the fascinatingly-textured orchestral
work Ab origine (1974) and the 1975 Marcus-Aurelius-inspired
chamber cantata Acta est fibula; the Música per
a violoncel i orquestra (1978), with its very individual
take on the concerto form and his opera Gaudí; the
latter written in 1992, though not, I think, performed until
2004.
Here the focus
is on some of Guinjoan’s chamber music which – outside Catalonia,
at any rate – has received rather less attention. It is played
by the members of the excellent Trio Kandinsky. We only get
to hear the trio playing en masse, as it were, in the Passim
Trio, which opens the disc. Elsewhere, Elegia is for unaccompanied
cello and Jondo is a piece for solo piano; Anniversari, Retaule
and, obviously, Duo are duet pieces for, respectively, violin
and cello, violin and piano and cello and piano.
Guinjoan is steeped
in the music of, to name but a few, Berg and Stravinsky, Boulez
and Schoenberg. But it is worth remembering that he has described
his single opera, Gaudi, as “anti-central European”
music; no doubt there was some rhetorical exaggeration in
that particular phrase, but what is undeniable and valuable
is that Guinjoan’s reworking of that particular modern tradition
has about it elements quite absent from the work of such central
European composers: the subtitle of Augustí Charles’ 1996
book – Joan Guinjoan: música mediterránea – is significant
and to the point.
Mediterranean
elements are perhaps most obvious in Jondo, which was premiered
in Saint Germain-en-Laye in April 1979 - and which has been
recorded more than once previously. The “deep song” of the
flamenco tradition isn’t imitated in any direct fashion in
Guinjoan’s piece, but there are allusions and evocations,
and the rhythms of the saeta (a kind of flamenco-based song
of religious devotion most often performed in Holy Week) are
hinted at at more than one point low in the keyboard part.
Jondo gets an authoritative performance from Emili Brugalla,
not least in the passionate climax. The other solo work, Elegia,
had its premiere in Barcelona in June of 1996. The score carries
the dedication ‘Recordant la mort de la meva mare’ (Remembering
the death of my mother). It is an emotionally intense piece
grounded in memories, of the composer’s childhood and its
background, as well as specifically of his mother, drawing
as it does on a children’s song and a traditional Easter Week
song from his native village. Elegia is played persuasively
and with passionate expressiveness by Amparo Lacruz. Cellists
planning solo recitals should surely take a good look at Elegia.
Of the three duets,
Retaule is an interesting example of Guinjoan’s early work,
more thoroughly “central European” - even if it also has a
French inflection - than the later work. The title, Retaule,
is the Catalan equivalent of the Spanish retablo, designating
a feature set behind the altar, essentially a screen framing
pictures, sculptures or mosaics. Such screens or paintings,
or sculptural complexes more often than not are in the form
of a triptych – and so is Guinjoan’s composition, structured
in three distinct sections. Indeed the structure of the work
rather dominates its other elements and the result is relatively
dry, more correct in terms of the textbook than engrossing
to the ear. Duo, written some two years earlier, has greater
vitality, not least in its employment of an ostinato rhythmic
pattern and some striking writing for the cello. Better still
is Anniversari, written over twenty years later – it was premiered
in Barcelona in December 1970. Here the influence of Jean-Etienne
Marie is evident in Guinjoan’s use of microtonal techniques.
A haunting opening layers harmonics in a fashion which is
lyrically expressive and the piece develops a sequence of
fragmentary melodic phrases which are interwoven and exchanged
between violin and cello in an increasingly intriguing dialogue.
The major work
here is the Passim Trio of 1988, a work which had its premiere
in Barcelona in October of that year, and is dedicated to
the Trio de Barcelona. This substantial trio is built around
a single main theme - related to the Dies Irae - hinted at
in the work’s opening but only stated fully later and then
becoming the subject of a series of variations. The emotional
range is considerable, in a work by turns melancholy, menacing,
animated and calmly deliberative. Though the piano takes the
dominant role, musical leadership is shared with the strings
and the writing is constantly inventive and not without a
certain humour as well as considerable power.
Guinjoan’s musical
vocabulary is distinctive; thoroughly grounded in the language
of modernism – both central European and French. His work
yet has qualities that mark it as distinctively Spanish, in
some of its rhythms, in occasional allusions and quotations
and – above all – in a refusal, at least in his mature works,
of any kind of compositional dogmatism. He favours a stylistic
pluralism working in the service of a truthfulness to personal
sensibility and an essentially lyrical expressiveness.
Glyn Pursglove
