“There is something
in good music that somehow suggests dance. It has been so since
the beginning of human history”. The words are those of the
Brazilian composer Francisco Mignone, but I suspect that they express sentiments with which
his fellow South American, the Argentinian
Albert Ginastera would have been happy
to endorse. Certainly the sense of the dance, and the actual
rhythms of the dance, are rarely far away on this set of Ginastera’s
keyboard music.
The first CD is
largely given over to relatively small-scale pieces, some of
them quite well known others much less so. Many are expressly
versions of Argentinian traditional
dances – as in the familiar set of ‘Danzas
argentinas’
which opens the programme. The first, the ‘danza
del viejo boyero’ (dance of the old
herdsman) is a delightfully quirky piece, based on the chacera,
with the left hand playing predominantly black notes, the right
hand white notes. It is characteristic of Ginastera
that thoroughly traditional elements should be employed – and
then treated in an idiosyncratic and inventive (but perfectly
‘serious’) fashion. The second of the three dances, the ‘danza
de la moza donosa’ (dance of the beautiful
maiden) is limpid piece in 6/8, with a couple of attractive
melodies, and based on the zamba
(a relatively ‘European’ dance, in which couples circle elegantly).
The third of this set, ‘danza del gaucho
matrero’ (dance of the clever cowboy)
is based on the malambo (a
solo male dance, a virtuoso showpiece involving complex manipulation
of lasso and boleadoras, and lots
of rapid foot movements); Ginastera’s
score includes such directions as salvaggio
and furiosamente – very much in the spirit of the malambo. The music is often dissonant, but also has
some melodic, tonal passages and creates an appropriate sense
of energy and passion, closing with a startling glissando. As
Fernando Viani says in his booklet
notes, this early work “features certain clearly defined elements
and compositional processes that would form the basis of later
compositions”.
One needn’t perhaps
argue that the Op.2 dances are the germ of all that follows,
but there is certainly a striking continuity and sense of development
to Ginastera’s writing for the keyboard.
It is more than just a coincidence that, for example, the chord
of E-A-D-G-B-E which closes the first of those three dances
also occurs at the very beginning of the Malambo,
Op.7, written three years later. In the early work the ‘quotations’
from Argentinian folk music are pretty direct, even if they are
treated in increasingly sophisticated ways. By the time of the
second version of the ‘Suite de danzas
criollas’, prepared in 1946, the folk
influence is a matter of spirit, as it were, rather than direct
allusion and Ginastera is constructing
more complex musical structures. Throughout the music on this
first CD, Fernando Viani is a very
persuasive advocate, even in such relatively slight pieces as
the ‘Danzas argentines para
los niños’ (which gets its first ever recording here) and the
two sets of ‘Piezas infantiles’
– there are affinities here with some of the miniatures in Villa
Lobos’s Guia Prático (Ginastera’s
’12 Preludios americanos’
include a brief ‘Homenaje a Heitor
Villa-Lobos’).
The strong element
of dance survives in the three piano sonatas which are at the
heart of the second CD. But now the treatment of folk sources
is altogether more sophisticated and challenging. Here the best
analogy might be with the ways in which, in the visual arts,
modernist painters and sculptors drew on ‘primitive’ sculpture
– such as the clear influence of African sculpture that one
finds in the work of artists such as Braque and Picasso, e.g.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906-7),
Negro Dancer 1907) and Fruit Dish (1908-9);
or, to take another example, the way the Giacommetti’s
sculptures in the 1920s drew on both African and Polynesian
models and, indeed, on ancient Etruscan sculpture. In terms
of musical language, Ginastera is perhaps closest to what Bartok
had done with native Hungarian materials, and Stravinsky with
Russian. Certainly Ginastera’s percussive
writing for the piano is often reminiscent of Bartok.
The opening movement
of the first sonata is full of aggressive chords and syncopated,
dancing rhythms, its second movement, marked ‘presto misterioso’,
full of a strange, hurried compulsions, a
twelve-tone line of intense anxiety, even in its pianissimo
sections. The relative peace of the adagio third movement is
hard earned, its lyrical intensity falling away into a kind
of dreamy melancholy. The final movement is the most directly
dance-like, the most obviously ‘Argentinian’.
There are fine performances of the sonata on record – e.g. by
Alberto Portugheis (ASV 865) and Barbara
Nissman (Pierian
005/6), but Viani loses little by
comparison, in a well judged, forceful performance, with a persuasive
control of rhythmic and dynamic contrasts. In the second piano
sonata Ginastera drew on pre-Columbian
musical traditions, very much in the manner of the visual modernists
alluded to above. Ginastera himself
described the sonata as evoking “the Aymara
and Quechua (extra-European) music of the north of my country,
with its pentatonic scales, melancholy melodies, or lively rhythms,
kenas [Andean flutes]
and drums, and microtonal melismas”.
It’s a fascinating piece, not least for the central adagio’s
version of the harawi, a pentatonic melody from Cuzco
and for the employment in the final movement (’Ostinato
aymará’) of the rhythm of the carnavalito
dance, in music that has a kind of savage, fractured joy. The
condensed, single-movement third sonata is also founded on the
rhythms of Argentinian dance forms, though its unrelenting intensity
(Ginastera observed that “the initial tempo marking, Impetuosamente, establishes the mood for the whole
piece”) may not be to all tastes. Still, in its simultaneous
use of traditional rhythms and a ‘modern’ harmonic language,
it is entirely characteristic of Ginastera. Again Viani acquits himself
very well, playing with real commitment and understanding.
Ginastera’s
two pieces for organ are new to me. The Op.18, Toccata, Villancico
y Fuga is rather less obviously
indebted to the dance than Ginastera’s
piano music is. There are clear debts to Bach – the closing
fugue takes as its subject a theme on the letters B-A-C-H, but
echoes are audible long before we get to the fugue. The Baroque
influence is never far away here, not just of Bach but of Latin-American
baroque too, of figures such as Domenico
Zipoli (Ginastera’s
piano transcription of an organ toccata by Zipoli
can be heard on the first of these CDs) who, though born in
Tuscany, was to spent a significant part of his musical life
in South America, eventually dying in Argentina in 1726. The
central villancico (a traditional
Christmas carol) of Ginastera’s work
is particularly lovely.
The Op.52 Variations
(here recorded for the first time) are rather more technically
demanding than the, Toccata, Villancico
y Fuga written some thirty
three years earlier. It is not perhaps especially Argentinian or even wholly characteristic of Ginastera. At a ‘blind’ hearing one might perhaps guess that
it was the work of a French composer or, at any rate, of a European
composer. These comments are not meant to deny the interest
of the work, merely to suggest that by the time of its composition,
some three years before his death, the relationship of Ginastera’s
music to its composer’s geographical origins was a subtle and
complex affair. It is good to have a recording of this piece.
It would merit consideration by other organists, since it is
a work of both substance and colour.
To say that Fernando
Viani’s performances of the better-known piano works are not
necessarily the very best available is not meant to damn them
with faint praises. These performances are intelligent,
perceptive and technically assured. What is particularly rewarding
is to follow one performer’s vision of the music through the entire
repertoire. Viani benefits from a good,
clear Naxos recording. This is a valuable
set, for which both Viani and Naxos
deserve our gratitude.
Glyn Pursglove
Fernando Viani (piano, *organ)
