2009-2010 Season
MAY-JUNE 2010
Sounds of Spain
Beyond Flamenco offers a deeper glimpse of Spanish culture.
By Elizabeth Station
Photography by Lloyd DeGrane
Say “Spanish music,” and certain impressions may come to mind: clicking castanets, flashy flamenco guitars, and the Concierto de Aranjuez as soundtrack to a car commercial with Ricardo Montalban. A three-day March festival, Beyond Flamenco: Finding Spain in Music, challenged those stereotypes. Focusing on early 20th-century classical music and drawing on art, literature, and history, the program invited University of Chicago audiences to replace clichés with a deeper understanding of Spanish culture.
Politically, Spain has a modern, cosmopolitan image. A socialist-led democracy, it assumed the presidency of the European Union this year. Yet the country’s cultural identity abroad is often reduced to an exotic caricature. Since the 19th century, outsiders have seen it as “the Spain of Carmen: bullfighters, poverty, flies, and passion,” wrote novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina in the festival program.
Beyond Flamenco, cosponsored by the University of Chicago Presents concert series and the nonprofit Instituto Cervantes of Chicago, provided a more authentic view. “Even in Spain, I don’t think anybody has attempted such an ambitious presentation of work by Spanish composers,” said conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez, the festival’s musical director. The opening concert in Mandel Hall featured piano and chamber music by Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) and the earlier Spanish masters—such as Tomás Luis de Victoria and Antonio Soler—who inspired him. The next evening pianist Pedro Carboné performed Iberia, a four-book suite of “impressions” by Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909). On its final night the festival showcased orchestral works by Falla and two contemporaries: Joaquín Turina, who was influenced by Andalusian music, and Basque composer Jesús Guridi.
Beyond Flamenco did not debut in Chicago. Music historian and classical-music producer Joseph Horowitz conceived the festival with Gil-Ordóñez and Muñoz Molina and had presented it before in Washington and New York. Their focus on understanding music in its historical and cultural context made the program a “natural fit” for U of C audiences, said Shauna Quill, executive director of University of Chicago Presents. The festival organizers, who describe themselves as “IberArtists,” were eager to collaborate with students and faculty. All events were held on campus, and the undergraduate Motet Choir and the University Symphony Orchestra rehearsed and performed with Gil-Ordóñez and Carboné. Faculty from music and Romance languages and literatures invited Horowitz and Muñoz Molina to classes, and the Smart Museum of Art showcased the works of Spanish painter and sculptor Julio González (1876–1942).
Throughout the festival, performers ceded the stage to commentators, with Horowitz and Muñoz Molina acting as intellectual guides to the music. After the Chicago Chamber Musicians played Falla’s Concerto for Keyboard and Five Instruments on opening night, Muñoz Molina put the piece in context. Dense and sometimes dissonant, the concerto is “deeply Spanish, in a nonstereotypical way, and deeply avant-garde and international,” he said. Although Falla’s devout Catholicism made him “an unlikely modernist,” he finished the work in 1926, “when [Federico] García Lorca was publishing his first poems, [Salvador] Dalí was starting to paint his first revolutionary paintings, and Luis Buñuel was planning Un Chien Andalou,” a groundbreaking surrealist film.
For Muñoz Molina, two events signaled the cultural effervescence and engagement that defined Spain in the early 20th century. In 1906 Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering neuroscience work; a year later Pablo Picasso shocked the Paris art world with the cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Politically, Spain careened from monarchy to military dictatorship to parliamentary republic. Conservatives rejected the country’s “Europeanization” and the secular culture and anticlerical politics of the left.
The conflict between nationalists and republicans deepened, and the country’s brief modernist experiment would come to an end with the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). After his friend García Lorca was assassinated, Falla, the composer of Nights in the Gardens of Spain, left for exile in Argentina. Even before the conservative triumph, many Spanish artists and musicians had “voted with their feet” by moving abroad. Albéniz, who was Catalan, spent most of his life in France, writing Iberia there. After his death in 1909, his difficult, demanding piano works became popular as slick orchestrations and transcriptions for classical guitar.
In the decades after the civil war, mainstream classical works like Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez would become synonymous with Spanish culture. By embracing more traditional artists and composers, Francisco Franco’s 36-year dictatorship tried “to erase the years of modernity,” Muñoz Molina told a festival audience. The move away from challenging, experimental musical styles represented “a country attempting to sabotage its own cultural heritage,” added Horowitz.
After Franco’s 1975 death, said Muñoz Molina, “our generation tried again to open up the country and find our own voices. We weren’t supposed to connect back to the example of those who had first shattered romantic stereotypes.” But with democracy’s return to Spain, musicians and artists have been free to reclaim their modernist roots.
'Beyond Flamenco' plants a powerful seed at U. of C.
REVIEW | Confronts common conception of Spanish music
March 8, 2010
BY WYNNE DELACOMA
The goal was ambitious at "Beyond Flamenco," a concert series presented over the weekend at the University of Chicago's Mandel Hall. The organizers were after nothing less than challenging deeply ingrained stereotypes about Spanish music.
"Gaudy, colorful, predictable," said Antonio Munoz-Molina, noted Spanish novelist, during a brief onstage discussion during Thursday's concert. "Not profound," added Joseph Horowitz, a music historian and innovative concert programmer, who is Munoz-Molina's partner on the "Beyond Flamenco" project.
It will take more than three concerts to banish our one-dimensional images of Spain as a land of brave bullfighters and fiery flamenco dancers. But the concerts planted a very powerful seed.
Thursday's concert focused on Manuel de Falla's Concerto for keyboard and five instruments, a relatively obscure, grippingly inventive work from 1926. Pedro Carbone, a formidable Spanish pianist, was the lead soloist, and Angel Gil-Ordonez conducted the ensemble of first-rank Chicago musicians: Dionne Jackson, flute; Jelena Dirks, oboe; Larry Combs, clarinet; Jasmin Lin, violin, and Stephen Balderston, cello.
The concert also included works ranging from 13th century liturgical chant to traditional Spanish folk tunes that influenced Falla's concerto. Repeating the 13-minute concerto to close the performance was inspired, giving us a chance to explore fully its austere, but often ecstatic, contours.
"Beyond Flamenco" closed Saturday with Gil-Ordonez leading U. of C.'s University Symphony Orchestra in music of Falla, Joaquin Turina and Jesus Guridi. This was the more familiar Spain, including the famous "Fire Dance" from Falla's ballet "El Amor Brujo" as well as his "Nights in the Gardens of Spain" with Carbone as soloist with the orchestra. Under Gil-Ordonez's enthusiastic guidance, the players reveled in Falla's sensuous sway. Guridi's "Ten Basque Melodies" was full of hearty good cheer.
Carbone is a fascinating musician, more interested in expressing the sinew and clarity in Spanish music rather than basking in its evanescent perfume. I was very sorry to have missed his performance Friday night of all four books of Isaac Albeniz's "Iberia."
At times Saturday in "Nights in the Gardens of Spain," his percussive piano became a guitar or a pair of castanets, the insistent rhythms of his metallic chords cutting the air. But his playing was always expressive. In the final section of "Nights," his supple phrasing was as luminous as moonlight.
Free-lance contributor Wynne Delacoma was the Sun-Times classical music critic from 1991-2006.
CHICAGO CLASSICAL REVIEW
Fri Mar 05, 2010
By Wynne Delacoma
Few of us go to concerts to hear the same old things. Even if we know the music so well that we could sing along, we still hope to hear something fresh and new in a live performance.
That sense of discovery was especially satisfying during the opening concert Thursday of a three-day “Beyond Flamenco” project running through Saturday at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall. The major revelation of Thursday’s concert was a concerto for keyboard, flute, oboe, clarinet, violin and cello by Manuel de Falla dating from 1926.
De Falla is one of Spain’s most well-known composers, and some of his works, such as the ebullient ballet Three-Cornered Hat, are concert-hall staples. But his relatively unknown concerto, with its astringent harmonies and often harsh rhythmic drive, revealed another side of a composer we identify with more relaxed, tuneful music.
Organized by music historian and concert programmer Joseph Horowitz and Spanish novelist Antonio Munoz-Molina, the concert series is designed to go beyond what the two call “postcard stereotypes” of Spain. Most of us see Spain as the land of Carmen, bull fighting and flamenco, they said in brief remarks during the program. Their aim is to offer a taste of a more serious, intellectually engaged Spain.
Thursday’s program combined music by Falla with performances of the Spanish religious, popular and classic music that influenced him. The combination of music, poetry and commentary was fast-paced and tightly focused, opening with de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance, a showy solo piano piece whose gaudy colors and propulsive rhythms epitomize the stereotype of exotic Spain. But Pedro Carbone played it with almost angry clarity, sharply etching every last one of its melodic swirls and lavish decoration rather than letting them race past in an incendiary blur.
The evening’s masterstroke was scheduling the 13-minute Falla concerto twice. Before the first performance, Horowitz and Munoz-Molina discussed it briefly, describing it as a work from the modernist era that included Stravinsky and Picasso. It returned to close the evening.
In between came a fascinating array of music and poetry, an overview of composers, writers and forms that influenced Falla. They ranged from 13th century liturgical chant and Renaissance motets to folk-influenced, 20th century solo songs by Joaquin Rodrigo. Performers were the university’s expressive Motet Choir and Amy Conn, a soprano with bright, sparkling tone, accompanied by pianist Shannon McGinnis. An intimate poem of religious ecstasy by St. John of the Cross also was part of the mix. Carbone tossed off three 18th century piano sonatas that brought to mind the prickly high spirits of Scarlatti’s harpsichord music.
Falla’s austere yet passionate concerto was in excellent hands. In addition to Carbone on piano, the performers were Dionne Jackson, flute; Jelena Dirks, oboe; Larry Combs, clarinet; Jasmin Lin, violin, and Stephen Balderston, cello. Gil-Ordonez conducted.
The tonal balance between Carbone’s forceful piano and the other five instruments was expertly handled. We had a sense of six soloists in constant, passionate conversation, their robust voices coming and going with ease. The piano’s emphatic, undulating arpeggios and the fierce slashes of Lin’s violin gave the first movement exuberant ferocity. The second movement was more solemn and grandly scaled. Incorporating fragments of the familiar liturgical chant “Pange lingua gloriosi,” it unfurled with the heroic sweep of a papal religious procession. Despite the dissonances that spiced the entire concerto, the final movement was merry and brimming with dancing rhythms.
Hearing it once was a pleasure. Hearing it twice was a revelation.
At 7:30 Friday,pianist Pedro Carbone will play all four books of Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia, a major work rarely performed in one evening. The series closes at 8 p.m. Saturday with dances and other pieces by Falla, Joaquin Turina and Jesus Guridi. Carbone will be soloist with U of C’s University Symphony Orchestra conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez.
http://chicagoclassicalreview.com/2010/03/de-fallas-concerto-makes-a-worthy-opener-for-flamenco-festival/
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