Cenas Portuguesas, Op. 9 (1904

ENG

This being my debut album, I wanted to dive into my roots and express my feelings and thoughts in the most genuine and authentic way. The programme presented here represents a journey through Iberian piano music, featuring composers and works that have, in some way, had an impact on my life. It starts and ends with two formally structured works, serving as foundations for the entire programme: the Sonatinas by Armando José Fernandes and Xavier Montsalvatge. In a freer style, the nationalistic suites by Isaac Albéniz (España) and José Vianna da Motta (Cenas Portuguesas) represent explorations of images, landscapes, dances, or typical scenes of Spanish and Portuguese everyday life. With two composers from each country, I felt I needed a link between them: someone who could create a bridge between the two cultures. No one better than Pedro Blanco represents the fusion between Spanish and Portuguese piano music. Born in Spain, where he formed his musical and artistic personality, he moved to Portugal where he spent most of his rather short adult life. He carried out very important cultural exchanges between Spain and Portugal, devotedly contributing to a contemporary cultural Iberianism. Pedro Blanco’s three pieces included on this album share the particularity of being dedicated to Portuguese artists.

My last piano teacher, Sequeira Costa, was a great interpreter of Iberian piano music. He was a major infl uence on my piano playing and his very personal approach to performing this repertoire has had a profound impact on my own. I remember him as I share this recording with you.

Paulo Oliveira

Armando José Fernandes was a Portuguese composer and pianist who remained in Lisbon for much of his life, growing up there, studying composition at the Lisbon Conservatory with Costa Ferreira and, in 1940, joining the faculty of the city’s Academia de Amadores de Música. Then in 1953 he was appointed lecturer in counterpoint at the Lisbon Conservatory. In the interim he studied in Paris with illustrious fi gures such as Nadia Boulanger, Paul Dukas, Jean Roger-Ducasse and Alfred Cortot, and he won the Moreira de Sá Prize for composition in 1944 and the Círculo de Cultura Musical prize in 1946. Fernandes had an introspective temperament that is refl ected in much of his music, which is usually for intimate chamber combinations and with a preference for Classical forms that has led to him being described as predominantly a ‘neoclassical’ composer.

The Sonatina (1941) for piano is an example of this aesthetic and was composed soon after Fernandes started his role at the Academia. The work opens with radiant chords punctuated by more fl uid piano writing; the effect is Impressionistic but goes beyond the pastel shades of Debussy and Ravel into more vivid terrain, anchored by a lilting recurring rhythm. The ‘Tempo di Folia’ refers to ‘La Folia’, an ancient and widespread melody and chord progression used in numerous compositions since the Middle Ages; it was especially popular during the Baroque era. The fi nale is an intricate, tonally ambiguous movement of great charm; at once spiky and dense, but ending with soft subtlety. Unlike Fernandes, the great Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz was rejected from the Paris Conservatoire as he was considered too immature to study there. He travelled to Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1875 and then studied at the Leipzig Conservatoire for all of two months in 1876. He eventually settled into studies at the Brussels Conservatoire until 1879, after which he returned to Madrid and established himself in Spain and further afi eld as a great pianist, as well as a conductor of a touring Zarzuela company (Zarzuela is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre). An adept improviser, Albéniz was able to compose quickly, and while he did write several larger-scale works much of his output was for solo piano – and has since gained an even wider audience through transcriptions for guitar.

España, seis hojas de álbum, Op. 165 (1890) epitomises Albéniz’s style, with an evocative Preludio that leaves us in no doubt as to its Spanish setting. The Tango is more sunny than sultry, and the Malagueña is a proud example of a traditional style of Andalusian fl amenco music that has its origins in the fandango music of Málaga on the Iberian peninsula. The Serenata is not a typical serenade, but its animated undercurrent has a suggestive, seductive quality that would surely win over its intended audience, and the Capricho catalán is a whimsical piece (deriving from the same root as ‘capricious’ or ‘capriccio’) inspired by the Catalan culture of eastern Spain. The lively Zortzico derives from a Basque rhythm based on irregular groupings of fi ve.

Pedro Blanco López bridges the gap between the music of Spain and Portugal explored on this recording: he was born in León in Spain and studied piano in Madrid, but his career took him to Porto, where he lived from 1903 until his death. As a writer, Pedro Blanco produced articles in both Spanish and Portuguese and sought to encourage exchanges of ideas between the two countries, promoting a contemporary cultural Iberianism. He became part of a diverse community based in the coastal city of Espinho, and soon gained a gaggle of disciples as an inspiring piano teacher at the new Porto Conservatory of Music, where he taught from 1917 until his premature death in 1919, caused by the fl u pandemic. Castilla, Op. 16 is a fourmovement work from which we hear the second, Nana leonesa. From Pedro Blanco’s six Heures Romantiques: Impressions Intimes, Op. 6 we hear the fi fth movement, Berceuse – a type of lullaby – which is dedicated to sculptor António Teixeira Lopes. The piece is prefaced with the words “Aux Enfants endormis de Teixeira Lopes” (“To The Sleeping Children by Teixeira Lopes”), alluding to a particular sculpture by the artist, a photograph of which is also included in the score. From Pedro Blanco’s Galanías, Op. 10, Paulo Oliveira plays Verbena (meaning a typical Spanish open-air fair or festivity), dedicated to Portuguese pianist and composer José Vianna da Motta – one of the last students of Franz Liszt.

José Vianna da Motta also studied with the conductor Hans von Bülow, whose infl uence lent his student’s fl amboyant skill an intellectual seriousness. In turn, Vianna da Motta taught Sequeira Costa, who taught both Paulo Oliveira and Artur Pizarro. Vianna da Motta was a highly celebrated pianist, touring Europe, where he accompanied the Navarrese violin virtuoso Pablo Sarasate, and travelling to New York where he met fellow piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni, with whom he remained close friends – he even wrote programme notes for Busoni’s prestigious series of concerto performances in Berlin. In 1900 the two pianists performed a concert in Weimar as a tribute to Liszt, playing a number of Liszt’s works and transcriptions including his arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for two pianos. Vianna da Motta made repeated trips to Buenos Aires and other parts of South America and, in 1903, performed at the Wigmore Hall in London. He was acclaimed for his virtuosity, but this was tempered by his devotion to the music of J.S. Bach and Beethoven; he played Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas during a series of concerts in Lisbon in 1927, a signifi cant occurrence in Portuguese musical life at the time. As a teacher, he rose to the heights of Director of the Lisbon Conservatory (from 1919), and as a composer his output was wide ranging; in 1906 he recorded some of his own piano pieces using piano rolls.

Vianna da Motta’s 3 Cenas Portuguesas, Op. 9 start with the graceful, rather coy delights of the Cantiga d’Amor (‘Song of Love’), although there are contrasting passages when this initial modesty gives way to something more complex and ardent.