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The programme of this CD is a portrait of Leo Brouwer's frenetic musical activity in the Seventies (of the last millennium). Its ordering is suggested by the emotional experience of hearing them. It consists partly of live recordings (with whatever equipment was at hand), partly of pieces recorded in studios in atmospheres of feverish experimentation.
The link that ties Brouwer the composer to the sophistications of popular Cuban rhythm is by now so well known as to deserve no further analysis. Less well known, though powerful enough to be a big feature of his music, is his profound awareness of the ritual, symbolic and evocative power of sound as such. When these elements - that genuine 'imprinting' of Caribbean culture - merge with his research into the idioms of the European avant-garde, the resulting works extend way beyond national boundaries and become a legacy of the whole of humanity.
Take his Canticum, for example. Composed with the didactic intent of offering a sampling of topoi of the then avant-garde (1969) without necessarily resorting to transcendental virtuosity, it's a work of high poetic resonance and the first, lucid example of the mature idiom that distinguished Brouwer's very personal compositional style. With its abandonment of classical syntax in favour of extra-musical models (sculptural, pictorial, biological, mathematical, geometric), it's the material itself that, by itself becoming modular, creates the form.
Or take his La espiral eterna, a landmark of 20th-century guitar music for the intellectual boldness of its conception and the expressive power of its realisation. It's a complex work in which the various results of his research on the transformation of sound and timbre come together and are translated into the sonorities of an utterly new 'guitar'. But it's also a work of great emotional impact, with lines of driving energy that expand and contract, forging the space-time in their own image. It's very dear to performers for the extreme quality of its 'digital-expressive' virtuosity, though the challenge is always contained within the limits of an eminently rational instrumental approach.
Or finally, take Per suonare a due for two guitars (or rather, one live guitarist and a recorded tape in playback). It's an 'open composition' displaying structural improvisation (the various sections are interchangeable), in which the two parts face one another in a highly theatrical play of contrasts (accord/discord; struggle/reconciliation; density/rarefaction; lightness/weight), generating a kind of pointilliste polyphony.
In Maderna's Serenata per un satellite the improvisation is even more radical, reflecting this composer's characteristic aleatory approach. It is even free over the choice of instrument. The score appears as a set of musical fragments arranged on the page in imaginative tracks that intersect, interrupt one another, come together and move apart, as if suggesting a vast range of performing possibilities, all left to the free choice of the hypothetical performers. In the interpretation heard here Leo improvises live (to the written notes!) over a version he had pre-recorded.
The guitar transcriptions of the two pieces by Manuel De Falla are an acknowledged tribute to one of Brouwer's favourite composers: one he had studied and analysed with rigorous continuity, not only as an illustrious example of how folk music can be transfigured in the classical world, but also as the master of a style based on the interaction between scale and harmonic spectrum.
The other works in the programme, strategically positioned to vary the emotional climate, are all reworkings of popular themes. They adopt the characteristic Brouwer style, which leaves the melody almost intact, while around it are created highly personal harmonies, introductions, counterpoints, interpolations and closes.
Copyright © Paolo Paolini
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