Albeniz a bit too vulgar for the refined taste of the Wiggies. Nelson Goerner looking ever more like Shura Cherkassky and more importantly playing like him . A sense of style and kaleidoscope of colour bringing a timeless beauty and radiance, in between clicking his heels and stamping his feet.
By coincidence it was Shura who introduced him to me when they shared the same agent Christa Phelps almost thirty years ago. He has since astounded the public and his colleagues ever since. No less than Martha Argerich regularly shares the platform with him and today he held us spellbound with the perfection of his playing.
A vibrant and ravishing sense of discovery . Not stale perfection but the remarkable beauty of recreation.
As Davide Sagliocca rightly points out : ‘ To call Albéniz’s sophisticated piano landscapes, vulgar , so admired by Debussy, who was famously particularly fond of ‘El Albaicin’, as were many others at the turn of 20th Century, is such a misnomer. It is like saying that Vaughan Williams symphonies or Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches are vulgar!’
But the last and only world must go to the mastery of Nelson Goerner who delved into this magic world which was obviously deeply ingrained into his being. No sign of any ‘aide memoire’ which could have been easily forgiven with a programme that is of such rarity. To present it without the score is a homage indeed to the genius of Albeniz.
There was a languid timeless beauty to ‘Evocación’ bathed in a mist of pedal out of which emerged the most haunting tenor melody accompanied by whispered asides like raindrops or the patter of footsteps in the distance. A barely audible ending drew us in, to overhear such wonders, only to be greeted with glee by two impish pizzicato final notes. Almost Beethovenian in showing us that the final notes are indeed the most unimportant and merely an ending to the wondrous sounds that have been witnessed within. The sun was shining brightly for ‘El Puerto’ with a kaleidoscope of colours and chameleonic moods and with the same impish no nonsense ending to this radiant temperature. There was real stamping of feet as the ‘Fête- Dieu à Séville’ gradually was streaked across the keyboard with athletic virtuosity as the passionate outpouring of the Corpus Christi procession was upon us with pride and exhilaration.
A tour de force of virtuosity and knowing use of the pedals with music that needed another stave in order to fit on the page.
Despite all these and his apparent musical talent, he did not really become a household name. Having moved from London to Paris and subsequently to Rome, he later confessed his departure from London was perhaps too early, which may explain his quieter concert life in the 1980s.
Who could ever forget that dashing young Spanish pianist (to use Annie Fischer’s words) Rafael Orozco who ran off with the Leeds Gold Medal with many performances of burning passionate intensity especially memorable of ‘Fête- Dieu’. He lived in Rome and would come to Alicia de Larrocha’s performances and would sail off in the car with her to his sumptuous apartment overlooking the Trevi Fountains. Alas a tragic ending of Romeo and Juliet proportions cut his life short much too soon.
‘Rondeña’ saw a pulsating melody amidst a driving dance of rhythmic insistence with another whispered ending and impish farewell.Played with an extraordinary sense of character each one of these twelve tone poems was treated with delicacy and poetic fantasy apart from quite considerable technical mastery. ‘Triana’ was a great way to close the first half of the complete Iberia. A flamenco with strumming guitars and snapping castanets and a hypnotic sense of dance. After the interval ‘El Albaicin’ was played with a whispered almost inaudible pitter patter bursting into flames of passionate decadence, interrupted only by its calming quasi religious recitativi. He brought a languid beauty to ‘El polo’ with an outpouring of extraordinary almost vulgar familiarity! Bursting into song and excitement with ‘Lavapiés’ with its impish good humour played with enticing exhilaration – how Shura would have loved these devilish leaps as he did in Copland’s El Salon Mexico! ‘Málaga’ was played with deep brooding of intense intimate meaning. ‘Jerez’, perhaps the most extraordinary and original of all Iberia, obviously a great influence on Debussy , with its fervent outpouring of simplicity and great burning intensity. Finally the extraordinary energy of ‘Eritaña’ depicting an inn on the outskirts of Seville. The ‘Venta Eritaña’ where ‘sherry is drunk, jamón crudo consumed , flamenco danced, castanets clicked as a rollercoaster ride of deliciously modern ,ever nostalgic Spain reaches its close’ .
An extraordinary ‘tour de force’ from Nelson Goerner who presents year after year interesting programmes prepared with scrupulous intelligence and mastery. We were thinking what could he play as an encore after this ninety minute marathon of poetic gymnastics. Nelson, a consummate artist knows when to stop, as he sent us away happily stamping our feet and clicking our heels with a soul full of sumptuous insinuating sounds ringing in our ears.
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual.
29 May 1860 Camprodon,Catalonia,Spain 18 May 1909 (aged 48) Cambo-le-Bains, France In 1867, at age 7, after apparently taking lessons from Antoine Francois Marmontel , Albéniz passed the entrance examination for piano at the Paris Conservatoire but he was refused admission because he was believed to be too young.The apex of Albéniz’s concert career is considered to be 1889 to 1892 when he had concert tours throughout Europe. During the 1890s Albéniz lived in London and Paris. For London he wrote some musical comedies which brought him to the attention of the wealthy Francis Money-Coutts,5th Baron Latymer Money-Coutts commissioned and provided him with librettos for the opera Henry Clifford and for a projected trilogy of Arthurian operas. The first of these, Merlin (1898–1902), was thought to have been lost but has recently been reconstructed and performed.[8] Albéniz never completed Lancelot (only the first act is finished, as a vocal and piano score), and he never began Guinevere, the final part.
In 1900, Albéniz started to suffer from Bright’s disease and returned to writing piano music.
Between 1905 and 1908, Albéniz composed his final masterpiece, Iberia (1908), a suite of twelve piano “impressions”.
On 18 May 1909 (116 years ago), at age 48, Albéniz died from his kidney disease in Cambo-les- Bains in Labourd, south-western France. Only a few weeks before his death, the French Government had bestowed upon Albéniz the Legion of Honour, its highest honour. He is buried at the Montjuïc Cemetery,Barcelona .
Albeniz’s Iberia was composed between 1905 and 1909 and is composed of four books of three pieces each; a complete performance lasts about
It is Albéniz’s best-known work and considered his masterpiece. It was highly praised by Debussy and Messiaen, who said: “Iberia is the wonder for the piano; it is perhaps on the highest place among the more brilliant pieces for the king of instruments”. Stylistically, this suite falls squarely in the school of Impressionism , especially in its musical evocations of Spain.It is considered one of the most challenging works for the piano: “There is really nothing in Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia that a good three-handed pianist could not master, given unlimited years of practice and permission to play at half tempo. But there are few pianists thus endowed.”The twelve pieces were first performed by the French pianist Blanche Selva , but each book was premiered in a different place and on a different date. Three of the performances were in Paris, the other being in a small town in the south of France.
Book IV: February 9, 1909, Société Nationale de Musique, Paris.
Book I: May 9, 1906, Salle Pleyel, Paris
Book II: September 11, 1907, Saint – Jean – de- Luz
Book III: January 2, 1908, Palace of Princess de Polignac, Paris
In January 1925 Selva moved to Barcelona from Paris where she founded her own music school and performed in a duo with violinist Joan Massià. In 1930 she developed a paralysis that ended her performing career, but she continued teaching, writing and composing.Blanche Selva was active as a translator and transcriber. But her main work is a monumental 7-volumes work on piano technique:
L’Enseignement musical de la Technique du Piano, Paris from 1916 to 1925
This book propose a radically new approach to piano playing. Her predilection for big arm gestures and her detailed descriptions of the most unusual types of attack, combined with the constant attention to the resulting tone-color, make his book a unique contribution to the history of the piano and its literature https://youtu.be/IdlM-nK8ppM?si=Nx8cyt8PRDaUSetl
ChristopherAxworthy-MusicCommentary 