Homenaje a Isaac Albéniz (II. León) / Tribute to Isaac Albéniz (II. León)

For Piano


Commentary
Recording
Reviews
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Commentary


At the beginning of 2009, and coinciding with the commemorative acts of the centenary of the death of Issac Albéniz (1860-1909), I was commissioned by the Spanish Association of Classical Music Festivals (FestClásica) to compose a work for piano in tribute to the composer. destined for a concert that would take place in autumn that same year and in which the pianist Juan Carlos Garvayo would take on the difficult challenge of premiering no less than twelve works composed for that occasion, under the name of Una Iberia para Albéniz.
In the words of Luis López de la Madrid, president of FestClásica, "based on the twelve pieces that make up the original work, Una Iberia para Albéniz provides twelve possible views of landscapes in Spain today, from the perspective of personal sensitivity and aesthetics of the composers" who were commissioned a work for this purpose.
It was inevitable that the pretext of homage to Albéniz would take me back to eight years ago, when I composed the Tribute to Isaac Albéniz (Jaén) destined to be the obligatory work of the 44th edition of the International Piano Competition "Jaén Award", held in January of 2002, and that already then I raised as if it were a new piece of Iberia seen from the current perspective. This commission, and the fact of once again having the figure of Issac Albéniz as a reference, and more specifically a Spanish town whose name the composed piece should have as its title, led me to project a more ambitious idea: that of bringing together three pieces of a similar nature that could constitute a fifth notebook of the wonderful suite of the Catalan composer. León, in this way, would be the second number after Jaén, and the composition of a third and last one would remain pending, which I carried out the following year with the composition of Salamanca. In this way, the Tribute to Isaac Albéniz was constituted in its entirety, each of the pieces that make it up having an independent life, as happens with the twelve pieces of the four Albéniz notebooks.
In addition to this reference to the composer and his work, León takes from Iberia -as it already happened with Jaén- the characteristic formal structure of most of the pieces in the suite: two very virtuosic and lively sections, of which the last one is a varied restatement of the first, and which in turn frame a calmer central section in which one usually finds a piano elaboration of a popular song. In this case, it is Por los aires van, a song from León that is very popular in the choral sphere thanks to the splendid harmonization that the composer from Orense by birth and from León by adoption Ángel Barja made of it.

After an elaboration of the incipit of the melody, at the end of the section there is a complete quote of the first stanza of the song. The extreme sections, for their part, do not contain popular elements, but they do appear in them "echoes" of bells that are intended to evoke those of the towers of the León’s cathedral of Santa María de Regla.

The Tribute to Issac Albéniz (II. León) was composed between the months of February and April 2009, and premiered, along with the other works composed for Una Iberia para Albéniz, on November 28, 2009 in the Hall of the Cloister of the Provincial Council of Cádiz, within the framework of the 7th edition of the Spanish Music Festival of that town. The twelve works were performed by Juan Carlos Garvayo, to whom the work is dedicated, and were recorded and later included on a CD published in 2010 by the Andalusian Music Documentation Center on the Almaviva label.

Recording

Recording: Juan Carlos Garvayo

Reviews

Tribute to Albéniz
By Luis Mazorra Incera
(Review published in the Internet magazine Ritmo. Madrid, February 29, 2024)

A piano of resounding sonority was presented by Josu de Solaun at his concert for the CNDM: SERIES 20/21 where homage was paid to Isaac Albéniz.
A musical tribute where three pieces by this Gerundian composer were alternated, taken from the first two notebooks of his Suite Iberia, along with José Luis Turina's Tribute to Albéniz, presented in three expansive works.
[...]
Interchanged, as I mentioned earlier, were three expansive pieces by José Luis Turina that demanded manifest technical versatility. It was his personal Tribute to Isaac Albéniz in three chapters of increasing abstraction.
Jaén was the first of them, where passion found form, in an assimilable structure, with turns and textures inspired by Albéniz's music. A pianistic technique deserving of this homage and all the consideration we wish to give it, in many aspects ahead of its time, inspired and universal compared to the all-powerful Chopin-Liszt heritage.
León was the second, with a firm aspiration to suggest those sustained textures that characterized the aesthetic nationalism of Camprodón's.
The third, more formally ambitious, Salamanca, maintained greater contrasts than the previous two, with higher aspirations and abstraction as well, seeking yes, Albéniz-like textures and technical leaps, but within a more ambitious formal structure and a much more varied, stratified, polyrhythmic, fragmented, and impulsive language at times.



Josu de Solaun places Isaac Albéniz and José Luis Turina at the keys.
By Ismael G. Cabral
(Review published in the Internet magazine Scherzo. Madrid, march 3, 2024)
On paper, a proposal that admirably acclimatizes two composers of yesterday and today with the necessary intermediary of a pianist (primarily) of repertoire. Also, a program that, by its seams, seemed inserted in the most contemporary cycle of the National Center for Musical Diffusion as a nod and an outstretched hand to the audience less inclined towards present-day music.
Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) and José Luis Turina (1952) share some similarities that tie them together; both possess a complex grammar that doesn't make the situation easy for the soloist, both indulge in sequences that accelerate in search of virtuosity, and equally, they combine popular allusions with a unique writing style that carefully avoids ethnomusicological copy-and-paste. For his part, Josu de Solaun understood that it was, before contrasting, about weaving; ultimately, Turina's three pieces (Homage to Isaac Albéniz I, II & III) are in turn very personal attempts to sketch an improbable fifth notebook of Iberia.
With Evocación, De Solaun offered the first glimpses of his way of being and playing the piano, devoid of showiness, immersed in technique, and possessing controlled pyrotechnics that delighted in the embellishment of melody but also in the exposition of a generous chromatic palette, in the colors that Albéniz dispatched in this and many other parts of the work. With Rondeña, there were sparks but also, and it is rare on this page, a certain point of severity and parsimony in the pedal that gave it an unexpected veneer, well received. Certainly, his vision of Iberia did not skimp on rubato, much less on the uninhibited character that rhythmically snakes through one piece and another, but nor did it surrender to that openly danceable side. For example, in El Puerto, the Basque pianist did not lose the melodic line while knowing how to give intensity, meaning, and argument to the voices that round off the atmosphere here and there.
Turina, in his contributions, does not stray from the keyboard; his is a language that, time and again in his catalog, asserts itself in the quotation, in homage, in rethinking the past perhaps, yes, with the aspiration to thus link himself to it. It is a legitimate path, as it could not be otherwise. As much as any other. And surely, in that obstinate look at what has happened, he finds listeners who feel appealed to by an aesthetic that, already in the first piece of his Homage to Albéniz, Jaén, gave evidence of its sparkling scholasticism. De Solaun interpreted the three works being aware that what interested were the consonances and cascades of notes, the intertextuality, and the melodic sketches. A score like Salamanca is difficult, very much so, to interpret, and in its sounding, it also wants the audience to participate in the applause for the virtuoso who is capable of -satisfactorily- dealing with it. That desire, which at its core is a perception, leads more to the epidermal than to the sanguine, more to the relevance of the notes than to that of the sound, ultimately. But surely, in this labyrinth of counterpoints and motifs, there are those who find form and substance. That's why it's good that it happens; there will always be those who feel that pleasurable tingling in their ears.

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(Score without watermarks available at www.asesores-musicales.com )