Piazzolla's The Four Seasons in Buenos Aires exists in
many arrangements - on MusicWeb International there have been
reviews of versions for full
orchestra, solo
piano, violin
& strings, wind
quintet and string
orchestra - and that's just in the last four years! This
is obviously a work that lends itself well to transcription,
and one of great popularity. In his notes, violinist Florian
Wilscher asks the presumably rhetorical question: "for
who could in this day and age imagine a music world without
Piazzolla?" For those who have so far resisted the temptation
to jump on any Piazzolla bandwagon, this version of The Four
Seasons is a dignified place to acquiesce - a very tasteful
transcription by the venerable José Bragato, who was once a
cellist in Piazzolla's renowned Nuevo Tango ensembles. Bragato
has made this sound like a piano trio original, with a particularly
romantic cello part; the piano trio seems an ideal medium to
convey this passionate, melancholic, but somehow uplifting music.
In fact, if Piazzolla himself had scored his work for this combination,
rather than his preferred, but rather dubious original choice
of electric-guitar-based quintet, many more would surely take
him more seriously as a composer of art music. After all, he
had studied under Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and there is clearly
considerable technique and originality underpinning this music.
Each of the four movements, linked musically in various ways,
has an abundance of haunting wistfulness in the tunes and syncopated
sensuality in the rhythms. The final movement, 'Winter', has
an incredibly moving melody for the cello, full of aching nostalgia.
Heitor Villa-Lobos's Piano Trio in C minor is an earlier
work by more than half a century, but it comes in a way from
a similar place - the South-American psyche - which may be why
the Villa-Lobos Trio chose this particular programme. As a Brazilian,
Villa-Lobos made immense use of the traditional musics of his
country, and of others, and there is little wonder that similarities
of mood at least occur between his music and that of Piazzolla
- at least in the latter's transcription for more orthodox forces.
On the other hand, Villa-Lobos was still a young man when he
wrote the First Piano Trio - in fact, this was
his first work for chamber forces, preceding the first of his
17 string quartets by four years. And the recentness of his
own study and internalisation of the Western art music tradition
is much in evidence - French, German and particularly Slavic
influences permeate the work. In fact, there is as yet very
little truly Brazilian music here! Nevertheless, the Piano Trio
is a work of considerable originality, and despite a lukewarm
initial reception at its première in Rio de Janeiro in 1915,
it was this work in particular that started him on the long
path to international recognition.
The final work on this disc is only really a taster. The Yumba-Verwandlung
is the third movement of Argentinean composer Lucio Bruno-Videla's
Piano Trio op.10 of 2004. According to the liner notes, this
work - either the whole Trio or just the Verwandlung, it's not
clear - was written for the Villa-Lobos Trio as a homage to
the Argentinean composer Osvaldo Pugliese, who died in 1995.
It is an adaptation of Pugliese's famous tango 'La Yumba', with
a transformation ('Verwandlung') into contemporary idiom. This
is an exciting piece of music, steeped in the quasi-mechanical
rhythms of the original, which is likely to have the listener
wondering why the rest of the work could not have been recorded
- with almost 25 minutes of blank space on this disc, Oehms
could surely have found room for it. Bruno-Videla has written
the liner-notes about himself and, rather disconcertingly, speaks
of himself in the third person ("Shortly after his graduation
in 1996, he was appointed..." etc.)
The CD booklet is glossy, clean, generally well written, and
has two or three unobtrusive photos in it to boot. Sound quality
is very high, with an attractively neutral positioning of instrumentalists.
The Villa-Lobos Trio could play this music in their sleep, but
they are wide awake here, alert to all the nuances and shadings,
and their expressive ensemble playing is exemplary in its technique,
passion and lyricism. An excellent, if rather short, disc.
Byzantion
Villa-Lobos Trio: (Rosángela Antunes (piano); Florian Wilscher (violin); Katrin Schickedanz (cello))
