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The piano duo formed by Fernando Turina and Miguel Zanetti, around 1984
Fantasía sobre "Don Giovanni" / Fantasy on "Don Giovanni"
For four-hands PianoCommentary
Recording
Review
Download score
Commentary
The Fantasy on "Don Giovanni" was written in 1981, at the request of the duo formed by Miguel Zanetti and Fernando Turina, and constitutes a by way of recreation of a genre very in vogue in the 19th century: that of "fantasies" or pot-pourris on opera themes that, through the four-hands piano performance, had a wide didiffusion in that way.
Unlike how Liszt did in his Fantasy of the same title, instead of using themes from Mozart's opera I just build a set of variations on an enigmatic series of twelve notes (for some, the first twelve-tone series in History of Music) that appears in the scene of the second act in which the Commander makes his entrance into the banquet:
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Non si pasce di cibo mortale chi si pasce di cibo celeste! |
In Mozart, of course, the use of the twelve sounds obeys a great modulating complexity, very appropriate for the dramaturgy of the action that is currently taking place. In my Fantasía it is only a mere constructive pretext, whose purpose is none other than to serve as a generating idea that provides coherence to the whole of the piece.
Program of the premiere of the Fantasía sobre "Don Giovanni"
(January 16, 1984)
The Fantasía sobre "Don Giovanni" was premiered by the Zanetti-Turina duo on January 16, 1984 in the Fernando de Rojas Hall of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, within the series of concerts "Musical Mondays of Spanish National Radio". In 1992 it was included in the CD "Contemporary Spanish music for four-hands piano", recorded by said duo for the RTVE label.
Cover of the CD Contemporary Spanish Music for four-hands Piano (1992)
Recording
Recording: Miguel Zanetti and Fernando Turina
YouTube link
First page of the Fantasy on "Don Giovanni"
Review
Four Spanish premieres
By Enrique Franco
(Review published in the newspaper El País. Madrid, January 18, 1984)
The Theater of the Fine Arts Circle was sold out last Monday, on the occasion of the four-hands piano concert offered by Miguel Zanetti and Fernando Turina, for the "Musical Mondays of Spanish National Radio". Sold out all the more remarkable given that the program was entirely dedicated to premieres by current Spanish authors: Montsalvatge, Valls, Oliver and José Luis Turina.
[...]
José Luis Turina (Madrid, 1952) takes advantage of the series of 12 sounds that appears in Mozart's opera Don Juan, for a set of variations in which good craftsmanship and sound delight are worth both, that poetic of timbres and environments present in almost all the scores of the Madrid musician. The Turina of today, like the one of yesteryear, is a sensitive one.
The greatest praise that can be made of the Zanetti-Turina duo is in the brief description of their program: Our music needs attitudes like that, on the part of the performers. Those who adopt them must be, by force, true musicians and act with such good judgment as nobility of style.