Chula is a percussive Portuguese folk dance dating back at least to the 18th century and inspiring in Vianna da Motta music of rhythmic vitality. The set is completed by the Valsa Caprichosa, which lives up to its name, the waltz’s momentum toyed with during a succession of subtly shifting tempi and moods. Catalan composer and critic Xavier Montsalvatge was one of the most important Spanish composers of the 20th century, studying in Barcelona and winning all of his country’s official composition prizes. A theatrical temperament attracted him to genres such as ballet and he collaborated with prominent singers including Victoria de los Ángeles and Montserrat Caballé, but he also cultivated a compositional language that embraced an array of forms and styles. An early interest in twelve-tone techniques and Wagner gave way to the influence of Olivier Messiaen and Georges Auric, with both of whom he was in regular contact, and he later absorbed the techniques of the avant-garde. Many of Montsalvatge’s works were written after the Spanish Civil War and show the modernist influence of his early teachers incorporated into his own individual voice; he was also a devoted admirer of Manuel de Falla, but balanced his desire to promote distinctive Spanish qualities in his music with a fierce, humanist intellect. Montsalvatge was adamant in resisting twee depictions of Spanish and its related cultures, explaining that he sought “to free myself from [regional] accents and Andalusian
flavour, the window to a picturesque style that horrifies me”. Montsalvatge was particularly drawn to Cuban music, which he brought into a number of his works, and his compositional procedures extended to ethnomusicology as he transcribed and adapted the music of the coastal people of Catalonia. He said of this meticulous process that “... to write down the melodies and the lyrics of what I wanted to select was very hard for me and put to test all my experience. At that time the magnetophone didn’t exist (or had not reached us yet) and we had to write it down by dictation from each of the interpretations”. In common with his fellow Catalan composer Federico Mompou, Montsalvatge combined childlike, naïve melodies with chromatic harmonies in a number of his pieces. The Sonatine pour Yvette (1962), composed for his daughter, is a fine example of this approach, blending diatonic melodies that evoke nursery rhymes or children’s games with sliding chromatic triads in the left hand and propulsive syncopation. The result is vividly colourful in a way that reveals Messiaen’s influence in particular; the dream-like second movement gives way to a fiendishly quick finale that playfully quotes Mozart’s ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman’ theme, and this good humour characterises the remainder of the movement, which ends with a witty flourish. Joanna Wyld
Text by Joanna Wyld / Odradek Records, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.odradek-records.com.