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This CD is the second stage in Victor Pellegrini's complete recording of Leo Brouwer's guitar works.
The project does not present the music in chronological order.
Instead it groups together sets of works representing the various themes featured in the composer's output.
This chapter is entitled "Orishas", after the syncretistic community of deities that merged Catholicism with the Yoruba religion brought over by the African slaves. In this peculiarly Cuban phenomenon the pagan gods and Christian saints offer themselves to the people's devotions in a spirit of respectful and mutually acknowledged equality (Yemanya, Ochun, Shango as Caridad del Cobre, Virgen de las Mercedes, Santa Barbara; Babalu ayé as S. Lazaro etc.).
Clearly the meaning and inspiration of a work like Rito de los Orishas (1993) lies not so much in direct references to the cult (let alone in faith) as in the feeling that a Cuban's ancestral roots are irrevocably half-caste.
This is the profound key to Cuban culture, and in this sense Brouwer belongs to a tradition eminently represented by musicians as Amedeo Roldan and Alejandro Caturla, writers as Alejo Carpentier and Nicolas Guillén and the painter Wilfredo Lam.
But though, to a greater or lesser degree, all of Leo Brouwer's output shows the clear inprint of such cubania , it is equally true that his voracious intellectual appetite has succeded in generating new and fascinating hybrids.
In the case of the Preludios epigramaticos (1984) he encounters a Japanese literary genre (the haiku, a kind of poetical improvisation, rigorously structured into 17 syllables, like the seventeen notes of the final Prelude) and the verses from Miguel Hernandez's Poemas de amor that act as subtitles to the six epigrams (Desde que el alba quiso ser alba, toda eres madre ; Tristes hombres si no mueren de amor ; Al rededor de tu piel, ato y desato la mia ; Rié, que todo rié: que todo es madre leve ; Me cogiste el corazon y hoy precipitas su vuelo ; Llego con tres heridas: la del amor, la de la muerte, la de la vida ).
In Variations sur un thème de Django Reinhardt it is the first three notes of the jazz evergreen Nuages that, together with its melodic and harmonic mutations, generates a series of rythms that make up a short survey of Baroque dance.
With the Tres piezas latino americanas (Danza del altiplano is dated 1961, Triste argentino and Tango are from the eighties) Brouwer engages in a process of re-composition using thematic material taken respectively from the folk tradition of the Andes, Guastavino and Piazzolla, adding introductions, bridge passages, harmonizations and counterpoints that transform them into highly personal utterances, while still maintaining the melodic purity of the originals.
Homenaje a Falla for guitar, flute, oboe annd clarinet (recorded here for the first time) is an early work composed in 1958.
None the less, it evokes with remarkable force the clarity of tone so peculiar to De Falla's Retablo de Maese Pedro and the Harpsichord Concerto.
The Tres Apuntes is a trilogy of works composed during the first three days of 1959 on the tide of enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution (1 January 1959): the first is based on material taken from Homenaje a Falla ; the second is a reworking of a fragment of chamber music for woodwind instruments by Brouwer himself; the third is based on a song for voice and piano on folk material from the Black Sea area.
Copyright © Paolo Paolini
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