MUSIC FOR FLUTE & GUITAR Tangos, Songs and Dances Taylor • Kain
MUSIC FOR FLUTE & GUITAR
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ASTOR PIAZZOLLA 1921-1992 Histoire du Tango I. Bordel 1900 II. Café 1930 III. Night-club 1960 IV. Concert d’aujourd’hui (Concert, present-day)
[18’45] 3’40 6’26 5’33 3’06
5 6 7 8 9
ROBERT BEASER b. 1954 from Mountain Songs Barbara Allen The House Carpenter He’s Gone Away Hush You Bye Cindy
[18’50] 3’16 2’15 5’23 5’03 2’53
0 ! @ £
DAVID LEISNER b. 1953 Dances in the Madhouse I. Tango Solitaire II. Waltz for the Old Folks III. Ballad for the Lonely IV. Samba!
[12’23] 4’31 1’58 3’45 2’09
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CELSO MACHADO b. 1953 Musiques Populaires Brésiliennes (Brazilian Folk Pieces) I. Paçoca (Peanut Candy) – Choro II. Quebra Queixo (Jawbreaker Candy) – Choro III. Piazza Vittorio (Victor Square) – Choro Maxixe IV. Algodão Doce (Fairy Floss) – Samba V. Sambossa (Dance Band) – Bossa Nova VI. Pé de Moleque (Nut Brittle) – Samba
[14’52] 2’42 3’22 3’04 1’37 1’36 2’31
ANDRÉ VICTOR CORREA 1888-1948 arr. Timothy Kain and Virginia Taylor
) André de Sapato Novo (Andre with New Shoes) Total Playing Time
2’13 67’03
Virginia Taylor flute Timothy Kain guitar
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The Americas – encompassing north and south, old and new, innocence and sophistication: four centuries discovered, and still the ‘New World’. Music of the Americas embraces those same polarities, with composers from Latin America and the United States bringing together new and old world styles. The sounds on this recording are a heady mix of classical formality, folk traditions and the vibrancy of urban pop. And its themes deal with what are ultimately the most important aspects of life: singing, dancing, food, love... and new shoes. Towards the end of his life, Astor Piazzolla – father of the tango nuevo or new tango – composed a miniature history of Argentina’s most popular urban dance, encapsulating its evolving character and eternal appeal. Histoire du Tango (Tale of the Tango) begins in a turn-of-the-century bordello, perhaps on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where its composer was born. Bordel 1900 is cheerful and bustling, its good-natured teasing carried along in a strong two-beat pulse with occasional help from the guitarist-as-drummer. Café 1930 brings the tango into the 1930s and a more respectable milieu. A rhapsodic introduction for the guitar sets the mood for a slow, heavily melodic interpretation of the dance. This melancholy tango-romanza seems less for dancing and more for storytelling of a typically fatalistic variety. The tango fell out of favour during the 1940s and 50s, only to be revived in the nightclubs of the 1960s, when Piazzolla returned from his studies with Nadia Boulanger, having found his compositional voice. It was the voice not of a contemporary ‘classical’ composer but, of a bandoneon player with a gift for the tango. ‘Tango nuevo’ was born. Night-club 1960 unites the traditional dance rhythms and colours with the percussive effects of the avant-garde and the improvisational freedom and rhythmic complexities of jazz. It is structurally more sophisticated too, moving away from the traditional three-part form of the early tangos. Concert d’aujourd’hui is a modern concert tango – literally a tango of ‘today’ – the title as well as its contemporary style revealing the influence of Piazzolla’s studies in France. The melody line is more dissonant and less singable, the harmony is more audacious, the rhythms more complex. There is a hint of Bartók and Stravinsky (who wrote his own tango in L’Histoire du Soldat). But this is surface gesture: beneath, you can feel the tango. ‘My tango,’ said Piazzolla, ‘meets the present.’ Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Robert Beaser has nurtured a style that synthesises European tradition and the American vernacular. His popular Mountain Songs – a cycle of eight movements when performed in its entirety – acquires its American character from the lyric ballads from the southern mountains of Appalachia. But the songs are not simple transcriptions for flute and guitar; rather, they
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have become the source for original music. The clarity and melodic sweep of these pieces is typical of Beaser’s lyrical style, which has been compared to that of Samuel Barber, and in 1986 Mountain Songs was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Contemporary Composition. Barbara Allen begins hesitantly, the guitar picking out a fragment of the melody, which is taken up by the flute. A Japanese flavour is given to the dialogue – the flute imitating the sounds of a shakuhachi – revealing the influence of Beaser’s studies with composer Tōru Takemitsu. But barely has the familiar tune been heard in its entirety than the music launches into a unique exploration of its melodic shapes and harmonic ideas, weaving together different versions of the melody. The House Carpenter and He’s Gone Away maintain the strongly improvisational spirit of the cycle, in which new melodies, harmonies and structures emerge from the traditional verse-forms. The selection of Mountain Songs on this recording concludes with two strangers to the Appalachian Mountains. Hush You Bye transforms a popular lullaby of the deep South into a whirling fantasia before returning to the calm of its opening. Cindy takes its cue from a minstrel fiddle song, and provides a spirited finale with a cheeky surprise in every verse. For popular music to be truly ‘of the people’ it must relate to real life. The early-20th-century American painter George Bellows felt the same way about his art, despite the prevailing belief that painting should ‘uplift and inspire the human spirit through its vision of the ideal.’ Bellows was not afraid to depict the harshness of life or the frailty of human beings in his scenes from everyday life, and one of the most powerful of these is his lithograph Dance in a Madhouse from 1917. Its subtle composition highlights four groups of asylum inmates, inspiring guitarist-composer David Leisner to match its evocative drama with that of his music. Leisner’s Dances in the Madhouse was completed at a time when a debilitating hand injury had forced him to stop playing and turn his attention to composition. Originally for violin and guitar, it has been widely performed in this version for flute and guitar and in an arrangement for orchestra. The first movement, Tango Solitaire, depicts a woman dancing stylishly, but alone. Its sensuous melancholy reminds us that every tango is a self-contained melodrama, and makes us pause to wonder: What story does this woman have to tell? The cadenza for unaccompanied flute only emphasises the feeling of isolation and self-absorption. The ‘old folks’ of the waltz are a happy couple who seem perfectly comfortable in their insanity. But there are no such delusions in the music – its predictable oom-pah rhythms are disturbed by
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unexpected, even crazy, bass lines and harmonies that nonetheless sit comfortably with the flute’s bizarre, unfurling melody. The Waltz for the Old Folks comes to an abrupt ending, as if they suddenly remember where they are. But not all are dancing in Bellows’ lithograph, and to one side sits a pair of forlorn, despairing women – even the rejected of society must have their wallflowers. For them Leisner has written a Ballad for the Lonely, in which a drooping and introverted piccolo melody provides a counterpoint for the resignation of the guitar’s gently moving lines. But attention ultimately turns to the middleaged couple in the foreground, dancing a wild and dizzy Samba!. Percussive effects on the guitar punctuate the music and draw attention to the relentless syncopations that underpin the busy, leaping melodic lines. The music is borne along by the energy of the samba rhythms until they are discarded in a throw-away ending. Virtuoso guitarist and composer Celso Machado was born near São Paulo, Brazil, into a family of musicians and a life of constant jam sessions. From the age of seven he was immersed in the popular music of Brazil, playing in roving street bands, but, like the Argentine Piazzolla, Machado made a thorough study of classical music and the European tradition. The result is an exciting blend of percussive rhythms, innovative harmonies and popular urban forms. Musiques Populaires Brésiliennes brings together the samba, choro and bossa nova in an encapsulation of Brazilian popular music not unlike Piazzolla’s history of the tango in Argentina. The first two movements are choros, a genre developed by the ‘musician serenaders’ of Rio de Janeiro in the 1870s. They had no special music but appropriated the dances and sentimental songs of 19thcentury Europe, and later the popular urban dances. Paçoca, named after a traditional Brazilian sweet, has a wistful simplicity and singing quality, but breaks into candid cheerfulness in its middle section. Quebra Queixo (another type of Brazilian confectionery) begins with idiomatic arpeggio patterns for the guitar supporting a sensuous flute melody. Two contrasting moments disrupt the mood, first when the flute soars into its upper register, and later when both instruments launch into a sedate polka. The choro maxixe is even more closely aligned with the fashionable European dances, the polka and the mazurka, adding Brazilian flavour with systematic syncopation that displaces the strong beats not only in the melodic line but in the accompaniment too. In fact the off-beat flute theme of Piazza Vittorio would be perpetually unsettling if it weren’t for the compelling drive of the underlying pulse. Like Quebra Queixo, Piazza Vittorio follows the formal structure of the polka, with a recurring
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theme interspersed by contrasting sections, but this buoyant music steals out of the 19th-century ballroom with a twinkle in its eye. Algodão Doce (literally ‘cotton candy’ or fairy floss) jumps a century to the samba revival of the 1970s. The style is freer and more spontaneous, with a smooth, seductive melody that develops from one tiny musical idea. The bossa nova is even more sultry – owing much of its mellow, laidback character to the fusion of cool jazz and Brazilian rhythms in the 1950s – and Sambossa is suave, romantic and pure ‘cool’. In Pé de Moleque Machado returns to the samba, the carnival dance genre renowned for its huge percussion bands. The percussion might be gone, but the rhythmic subtleties remain. Brazilian composer André Victor Correa began his career as a music professor. In 1936, he became the director of a jazz band, acquiring the familiar name ‘André-the-Saxophonist’. André de Sapato Novo, another example of the enduringly popular choro, dates from the last years of Correa’s life and is probably his best-known piece. Its enigmatic title leaves us wondering whether this is a serenade of the choro tradition. Perhaps... surely any girl would fall for a boy with new shoes. Then again, as guitarist Timothy Kain suggests, maybe they’re dancing shoes, which would make this samba-choro a display as well as an invitation. The music bears this out, playing with the idea of a low held note in the flute that skips up to ever new and more virtuosic variations. And in this transcription for flute and guitar the shoes must, of course, be two-tone. Irresistible! Yvonne Frindle Recording Producer & Editor Ralph Lane OAM Recording Engineer Dennis Fox Cover and Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd ABC Classics Robert Patterson, Martin Buzacott, Hilary Shrubb, Natalie Shea, Laura Bell. Recorded 14-16 May 1997 in the Eugene Goossens Hall of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ultimo Centre, Sydney. 1999 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 훿 2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal Music Group, under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited.
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