When this release was first announced, a friend was skeptical:
Arcadi Volodos, showman virtuoso, playing the music of Federico Mompou,
poetic loner? The match could hardly be more surprising - or successful.
Whether you read Volodos' booklet essay, listen to the way he's
transcribed two songs in new guises for solo piano, or hear his playing
throughout the CD, there's no doubting the artist's sincere affection and
affinity for this music. With the second half taken up by excerpts from the
austerely beautiful masterwork
Música callada, the CD forms a
sort of logical progression from Mompou's early years, more in the style of
Debussy, to the sparer, leaner works of his maturity. This program usefully
reveals a cross-section of the composer's long career:
Musica callada
is his last published piano music, but
Scènes d'enfants is
among his first. Volodos excels in all of it.
Actually, we'd had inklings of his gifts as a colorist and
tone-painter for some time, since his live
In Vienna album - which
this site somehow never reviewed. This new disc only confirms the genius of
Volodos, because the man who started his career with virtuoso Liszt
transcriptions is just as comfortable, maybe more so, with the pauses and
empty spaces of Mompou's language. It's like the Japanese sketches which
achieve, using as few strokes as possible on a wide mostly empty canvas,
maximal expressive power. One never senses, not for a second, that Volodos
wants to rush through, or make Mompou into something he is not. In fact, the
words he's written in the booklet, though rather breathless with praise,
show great understanding: “there is neither contrast nor conflict; but
thanks to the deliberately chosen modest resources, the music rises to an
altitude where the listener has the impression of living outside time for a
moment”.
There are competing releases. Jenny Lin recorded all of
Música callada recently for Steinway & Sons, a disc which
wound up on many Recording of the Year lists.
Mompou himself recorded what we thought was his complete piano
music after he turned 80 - unpublished discoveries have
turned up on Naxos. I almost want to waive the need for
comparisons. This is music which very badly needs to be part of our core
repertoire, and that means encouraging more pianists to present their
viewpoints and their ideas. It would be unfortunate if the presence of
Mompou's own recordings inhibited future interpreters, especially those as
great and as devoted as Jenny Lin and Arcadi Volodos.
By the way, the engineering is faultless, and the CD is presented as
a miniature hardback book, with the disc itself inside the front cover and
60 photo-filled pages that focus so informatively on Mompou that they don't
include a biography of the pianist. This is truly a first-class production.
Brian Reinhart
