So I slapped on this CD I'd picked up -- and had to share this little Intermezzo, Cavatine, and Andante con moto

Yehudi Menuhin, violin; Jacques Février, piano. EMI, recorded Nov. 22-30, 1971

by Ken

Yes, I know we still have important work to complete on Schubert's song "An die Musik," Richard Strauss's song "Zueignung," and the Composer's memorable declaration in the Prologue to Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos that "Music is a holy art," dealing with the important (to me, anyway) questions: (1) What links them? (2) What the hell does it matter? The next, and hopefully final, installment is mostly written, though I suspect that a good part of what keeps me from trying to push it to completion is the fear that it isn't as near to completion as I'm pretending.

Meanwhile, did you listen to the little Intermezzo above? Is that beautiful or what? And did you note Yehudi Menuhin channeling an inner Gypsy I didn't know he had in him. That Intermezzo is one of three movements that grabbed my attention on a CD I slapped on while doing something-or-other at the computer -- all, interestingly, slow movements, from three different works by the same composer. And if you don't know who he is as we listen to the other two, so much the better, because if I hadn't known, I doubt that I would have guessed, and especially not from these slow movements, because even though this is a composer I'm reasonably familiar with, I don't have very good "markers" to identify his music, especially not music of this sort. Or rather these sorts, since these three slow movements are hardly peas in a pod.

So let's listen to a little Cavatine and a little Andante con moto.

Sonata for Cello and Piano:
ii. Cavatine

Pierre Fournier, cello; Jacques Février, piano. EMI, recorded Nov. 22-30, 1971

Trio for Piano, Oboe, and Bassoon:
ii. Andante con moto

Jacques Février, piano; Robert Casier, oboe; Gérard Faisandier, bassoon. EMI, recorded Jan. 20-21, 1964


"THE GUITAR MAKES DREAMS WEEP"

I don't think I'm giving away any deep secrets at this point by noting that our composer is French. Still, in the Intermezzo of the Violin Sonata there's surely something else at play. And if you looked at the score page I posted above, you may have noticed the inscription: "La guitare fait pleurer les songes," credited to "G. Lorca." In fact, the sonata itself is inscribed:

"To the memory of Federico Garcia Lorca 1899-1936"

Sure enough, that line is, "The guitar makes dreams weep," is from Lorca, from his Poema del Cante Jondo. Which raises the obvious question: What in tarnation is "cante jondo"? According to Wikipedia, it's "a vocal style in flamenco, an unspoiled form of Andalusian folk music. The name means "deep song" in Spanish . . . . It is generally considered that the common traditional classification of flamenco music is divided into three groups of which the deepest, most serious forms are known as cante jondo." There follows an interesting note headed "Cultural references to cante jondo":

In 1922 the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla led in the organization of the Concurso de Cante Jondo for Granada. Many classical musicians, cultural and literary figures, including the young poet Federico García Lorca, participated in the program. The result was the memorable series of flamenco performances held at the Alhambra during June.

Lorca had evidently used the title Poema del cante jondo for a 1921 collection of poems, although he did not publish it for ten years.

In 1931, García Lorca presented a conference devoted to keeping the rich tradition of the cante jondo alive. The following is translated from the conference notes by Lorca:

The cante jondo approaches the rhythm of the birds and the natural music of the black poplar and the waves; it is simple in oldness and style. It is also a rare example of primitive song, the oldest of all Europe, where the ruins of history, the lyrical fragment eaten by the sand, appear live like the first morning of its life. The illustrious Falla, who studied the question attentively, affirms that the gypsy siguiriya is the song type of the group cante jondo and declares that it is the only song on our continent that has been conserved in its pure form, because of its composition and its style and the qualities it has in itself, the primitive songs of the oriental people.

[This excerpt is acknowledged to be "paraphrased slightly" from the version that appears on the Casa de la Guitarra Española website, whose English is indeed sometimes slightly awkward but which remains invaluable for its presentation of this entire document.]

Nikita Boriso-Glebsky and Kasparas Uinskas perform the Violin Sonata in the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Hall, Vilnius, 2015: i. Allegro con fuoco, ii. Cavatine, at 6:51; iii. Presto tragico, at 13:44. (I suggest trying not to look at the violinist's grimacing.) There are other YouTube video performances, but you might want to go for the audio recording by Josef Suk with Jan Panenka, his favorite partner.

By the way, the 1949 "corrected" (the composer's term) edition of the sonata indicates that the third-movement Presto tragico is a "new version."


SO, OUR COMPOSER IS FRANCIS POULENC (1899-1963)



And I thought we might run through our three slow movements again, now properly identified.

POULENC: Sonata for Violin and Piano ("à la mémoire de Federico Garcia Lorca 1899-1936") (1943, "corrected" 1949):
ii. Intermezzo (très lent et calme) (very slow and calm)

Yehudi Menuhin, violin; Jacques Février, piano. EMI, recorded Nov. 22-30, 1971

POULENC: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948, "corrected" 1953):
ii. Cavatine

Pierre Fournier, cello; Jacques Février, piano. EMI, recorded Nov. 22-30, 1971

POULENC: Trio for Piano, Oboe, and Bassoon (1926):
ii. Andante con moto

Jacques Février, piano; Robert Casier, oboe; Gérard Faisandier, bassoon. EMI, recorded Jan. 20-21, 1964

The Trio, you'll note, is a significantly earlier work. Also, I'm somewhat less enthusiastic about this performance (not altogether crazy about players of those notoriously crotchety double-reed instruments), but the ever-reliable Jacques Février remains a powerfully steadying presence.


I HOPE YOU'RE CURIOUS TO HEAR THE OTHER WORKS WHOLE

Here's the Cello Sonata:


Julian Schwarz and Marika Bournaki perform the Cello Sonata at the Eastern Music Festival, Greensboro, NC, July 20, 2015: i. Allegro (Tempo di marcia); ii. Cavatine, at 6:14; iii. Ballabile, at 13:52; iv. Finale, at 17:43. There are also YouTube performances from the semifinal round of the 2017 Queen Elisabeth (Belgium) Competition, like these by Aurélien Pascal and Anna Neretto and Bruno Philippe and Tanguy de Williencourt.

And you can watch performances of the Trio for Piano, Oboe, and Bassoon by Henri Sigfridsson, Rachel Bullen, and Etienne Boudreault and by Bruno Belthoise, Guillaume Gerbaud, and Lomic Lamouroux .

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