Homenaje a Isaac Albéniz (III. Salamanca) / Tribute to Isaac Albéniz (III. Salamanca)

For Piano


Commentary
Video
Reviews
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Commentary


After Jaén and León, first and second numbers of the Tribute to Isaac Albéniz and composed respectively in 2001 and 2009, the turn came in 2010 to the third and last movement, Salamanca, which came to complete the project of the false “fifth notebook” of Iberia, whose idea had been haunting me since Jaén was performed many times as it was the obligatory work of the 44th edition of the International Piano Competition "Premio Jaén", held in March 2002.
As in the case of its predecessors, Salamanca takes directly from Iberia not only the reference to a Spanish geographical point, but also the virtuosic character of the treatment of the piano and the use of popular material from Salamancan folklore. Specifically, I used the melody of two “Charradas” (the one from San Roque and the one from Santiago de la Puebla, collected in 2004 by Lola Pérez Rivera in the compilation "Shawm music in Castilla and León"), with its characteristic rhythm in which the pulse is divided into groups of five sixteenth notes, instead of the usual four of any binary, ternary or quaternary rhythm, and that of the "Sol y Luna" jota from Salamanca, collected in "Spanish musical folklore", by Juan Hidalgo Montoya (1974).

Charrada de San Roque, performed by "Los Pachulos"

The material from the charradas serves as the basis for the main thematic ideas of a virtuosic nature in the piece, while the melody of the jota, with its more singable character, is combined contrapuntally in the central part of the piece with the use of the motif of Margarita from the "Faust" Symphony by Franz Liszt, in a conceptual game related to the specialization in the music of the Hungarian composer by Miriam Gómez-Morán, a student of my harmony courses at the Madrid conservatory at the beginning of the decade of the 90s of the last century and dedicatee of the score.

Salamanca was composed between the months of May and July 2010, being premiered at the Auditorium of the Superior Conservatory of Music of said city on October 10, 2012 by Miriam Gómez-Morán, preceded by a brief presentation of the work for my part.

Video

Miriam Gómez-Morán

Salamanca, Auditorium of the High Conservatory of Music, October 10, 2012
(Low quality recording)

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 )