Villa-Lobos, Five Preludes for guitar

In addition to being a skilled amateur guitarist, Heitor Villa-Lobos' father was a man of broad culture and uncommon intelligence. For years he worked as an official of the National Library in Rio de Janeiro, and at the time of his death in 1899, he left no great possessions, except for a vast and expensive library that his son Heitor would be forced to sell to feed the fatherless family when the future composer was only twelve years old.

In the streets of Rio
At the beginning of the 20th century, Rio de Janeiro was far from being the metropolis we know today. But music flooded its streets even during the day. And in the evenings, after having participated in some party, or dance, wedding, or carnival, groups of young musicians would roam the streets making music, taking a break to enter a bar here and then another so that the mood would not wane.

Heitor Villa-Lobos was part of these bands of young musicians and it was in the street where he made his first guitar playing, in addition to numerous bohemian friendships, because any volume from his father's library was also enough for several drinks.

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959)

Brazil and Paris
Reluctant to receive formal musical education, between the ages of 18 and 25 Villa-Lobos made extensive trips throughout Brazil, collecting songs and getting to know the main characteristic styles of autochthonous music. By 1923 he was already a renowned composer in his homeland. So, the Brazilian government agreed to grant him a scholarship to travel to Europe so that he could get to know other worlds and other music. He lived in Paris until 1930, receiving the recognition and admiration of the musical celebrities of the time, including the famous Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, to whom he dedicated much of his guitar work.

Five Preludes for guitar
Apparently, there were originally six of them and one was either lost or never published. Composed in 1940 at Segovia's request, they are dedicated to Mindinha, his wife, Arminda Villa-Lobos. They are a clear example of the fusion of styles that characterizes Villa-Lobos' guitar work: Brazilian popular music and classical European tradition.

Its parts, or movements, with a subtitle added by Villa-Lobos, are:

00       Prelude No. 1 in E minor ("Melodia lírica"): Andantino espressivo-Più mosso

04:20  Prelude No. 2 in E major ("Melodia capadócia"): Andantino-Più mosso

07:02  Prelude No. 3 in A minor ("Homenagem a Bach"): Andante-Molto adagio e dolorido

12:40  Prelude No. 4 in E minor ("Homenagem ao índio brasileiro"): Lento-Animato-Moderato

16:02  Prelude No. 5 in D major ("Homenagem à Vida Social"): Poco animato-Meno-Più mosso

The rendition is by the Greek artist Evangelo Assimakopoulos.

Johann Pachelbel, Canon in D major

As one might expect, the German organist and composer Johann Pachelbel, born in Nuremberg in 1653, did more in life than just write his highly acclaimed Canon in D major. Pachelbel, indeed, was a key figure of the Baroque period and his work was an important contribution to the development of sacred and keyboard music in the German Lutheran Church. 

For many years he lived in Vienna, where he became acquainted with the work of the Italian Frescobaldi, which greatly influenced his choral preludes, which in turn inspired the music of the same genre by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose parents Pachelbel met in Eisenach while serving as court organist there in 1677, eight years before Johann Sebastian came into the world.

Johann Pachelbel (1653 - 1706)

Oblivion and rediscovery

Pachelbel, like many other baroque musicians, was a very popular composer in his time. And like so many others in the history of music – Bach himself, for example – he remained forgotten for centuries.

But in the mid-sixties of the twentieth century, violinist and conductor Rudolph Baumgartner and the Swiss Lucerne Festival Strings recorded a baroque piece called Pachelbel's Canon for France's Erato. It was a canon and a gigue by Pachelbel composed around 1700. Surprisingly, within a short time, the piece had become a best-seller.

Canon in D major

A few years later, actor Robert Redford used the piece as part of the soundtrack for the film with which he made his directorial debut, 1980's Ordinary People. As a result, Pachelbel's Canon became for a short period the most popular classical piece of all time.

From that date until today, the various versions are counted by the hundreds, and there are versions for all tastes and for every conceivable instrument or set of instruments.

We are presenting here the San Francisco Early Music Ensemble "Voices of Music", with period instruments and the original ensemble, for three violins and basso continuo.

Chopin, Waltz in A flat, Op 42

In the summer of 1840, the singular family formed by Chopin, the writer George Sand and her children, Solange and Maurice, could not repeat what had happened the previous year when they packed their belongings and left to enjoy three months of well-deserved rest in the summer house that Sand kept in Nohant, 200 km south of Paris. This time there was no budget, since the last work of the tireless and prolific writer had turned out to be a failure, and there was no way to pay for the three-month stay at the summer house, at four thousand francs a month, not counting travel expenses.

Summer in Paris
So they remained in Paris. George Sand would edit and rewrite her works, and Chopin, who had already begun to get used to composing only in Nohant, would have to readjust his routine and work in Paris during the summer. Otherwise, he had no pupils during those months. And despite the unusual circumstances, 1840 was a fruitful year, a year of uninterrupted work at 16 Rue Pigalle. For example, the Fantasia in F minor, and the sinuous Waltz in A flat, opus 42, published that same year without a dedication, date from that date.

Waltz in A flat, opus 42
Robert Schumann, an enthusiastic admirer of Chopin and who had already spoken highly of the Etude opus 25 No. 1, wrote of this waltz that "if it were ever to be danced, only the countesses would have to do it". We do not understand what he really meant, perhaps that it required extreme elegance to do so.
The superimposition of a binary rhythm in the right hand and a ternary rhythm in the left hand in the main theme, together with the speed here infused by Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky, make the dance impracticable even for the countesses. A scintillating coda (2:37) brings the little piece to a close, crowned by vigorous unison notes in the low register.

György Ligeti, Two Études for piano

György Ligeti, one of the most important avant-garde composers in the second half of the 20th century, widely known after Stanley Kubrick included excerpts of his work in the soundtrack of the film 2001 Space Odyssey, began his musical career by simply writing a waltz. He was 14 years old and had recently begun his first piano lessons in a small town in the Transylvania region of Romania.
The Second World War would interrupt his studies.

The postwar period
But he survived the holocaust (his father and brother did not). After the war, Ligeti will have to face the new authorities and try to create a new post-war musical language immersed in a society living in isolation from modern Western trends. After the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, he fled to the West, settling in Vienna. There he met Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.

Experiments

György Ligeti (1923 - 2006)

But the experiments of the European avant-garde leaders rather disorient him. He had always been somewhat skeptical of electronic music and also of dodecaphonism. After three years in the Cologne circle, he abandoned the electronic trend to study an intricate rhythmic approach proposed by the Mexican composer of American origin, Conlon Nancarrow.

Études for piano

From the seventies onwards, Ligeti added to his search an interest in the rhythmic aspects of African music. In the following decades his work will see an accentuated emphasis on polyrhythm, leading him to propose very complex rhythmic structures. An example of this is his trilogy Études pour piano, three books each containing from six to eight études written between 1985 and 2001. They abound in influences as varied as gamelan, African polyrhythms, Béla Bártok, Nancarrow of course, and even reveal a debt to the American jazz pianist Bill Evans.

Chinese pianist Yuja Wang offers us the Étude No. 4, Fanfares, from Book I, and the Étude No. 4, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) from Book II. 

Strauss / Grünfeld, "Soirée de Vienne"

Unlike their contemporaries and fellow musicians in much of Western Europe, the pianist and composer Alfred Grünfeld and his brother Heinrich, a cellist, were not sent by their parents to study law or to pursue a career in arms. On the contrary, from a very early age their audacious parents – the father, a leather merchant – raised them to develop an adult life as renowned professional musicians. It will be the older brother, Alfred, who will reap the greatest successes.

Alfred Grünfeld, pianist
Born in Prague in 1852, he was just over ten years old when he was sent to Berlin to study piano. Remarkably gifted, at 21 he was already settled in Vienna, developing a successful career as a piano teacher and concert pianist in the European musical capital of the time, where he remained until the end of his days, delighting Viennese audiences with his slightly syrupy, if very novel, piano transcriptions of the waltzes of Johann Strauss Jr.

Alfred Grünfeld (1852 - 1924)

A recording pioneer, in 1899
Also the author of a couple of operettas that did not stand the test of time, Grünfeld was the first major professional pianist to make recordings, the first of them in 1899 for the nascent Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft label. By 1914, he had made more than a hundred.

But as a composer – or rather an arranger – he is remembered today mainly for his Strauss transcriptions, which from time to time some intrepid pianist gives as an encore at the end of a slightly modern program, as compensation.

Soirée de Vienne
In Evgeny Kissin's version, one of Grünfeld's greatest successes is presented here, a paraphrase of Viennese waltzes entitled "Soirée de Vienne", a highly technically demanding piece. Grünfeld was a minor composer, of course, but as a performer, he must have been an outstanding pianist.