Catalan Concertinos and Fantasias
Marc MIGÓ (b. 1993)
Fantasia popular (2016, rev. 2017) [11:57]
Joan MANÉN (1883-1961)
Violin Concertino, Op. A-49 (date unknown) [25:51]
Marc MIGÓ
Piano Concertino (2016) [9:46]
Epitafi a Hans Rott, for strings (2015) [16:31]
Joan MANÉN
Rapsòdia catalana, Op. A-50 (1954) [13:06]
Kalina Macuta (violin): Sergi Pacheco (piano: Piano Concertino): Daniel Blanch (piano: Rapsòdia catalana)
National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine/Volodymyr Sirenko
rec. October 2018, Concert Hall of Ukrainian Radio, Kyiv
TOCCATA NEXT TOCN 0010 [77:14]
‘Next’ is a relatively new marque in Toccata’s production line and is devoted to (almost always) unrecorded music but with the rather boarder opportunity to include more than one composer. As regulars will know, Toccata’s main releases focus on single composer discs. So, in the case of the disc under review, we have two Catalan composers whose birth dates are 100 years apart. Though stylistically different, there is a binding element at work, which is the region’s folklore.
Joan Manén will be known to violin specialists – he made the first complete recording of the Beethoven violin concerto – but increasingly his large-scale works for the instrument have been made available On Naxos you can find the Concierto español (review), the Violin Concerto No. 3 and Second Symphony (review) and his violin and piano works are on the La Mà de Guido label (review and review). Notwithstanding this late flowering enthusiasm, I think it would be fair to say that during Manén’s lifetime, and for a number of years after his death in 1971, his best known work was the Fantasia-Sonata he wrote for Segovia (review).
His Violin Concertino, Op.A-49 is undated though it was performed for Saarland Radio in 1964, so that could be a clue. It’s an ingratiating 26-minute work in three movements and though it opens with an angular orchestral motif the solo violin offers instead lyric grace with rich Iberian songfulness. Manén doesn’t neglect orchestral characterisation – there’s some wry writing for the bassoon, for instance – amidst gentle hints of the Baroque. This is a very easy-going, old school work, its brief central slow movement redolent of something like Glazunov and its finale jaunty, lightly scored, with genial lines for clarinet and horn. Kalina Macuta pirouettes elegantly and dispatches the cadenza adroitly.
The other Manén work is Rapsòdia catalana which dates from 1954. It offers a seamless three-section love letter to three Catalan folksongs; The Two Paths, The Smugglers and When father has no bread. They’re not merely stitched together but use a concertante piano part – excellently realised by Daniel Blanch - to emphasise and colour the folk tunes. It has Falla-like richness and verve though not really Falla-like memorability.
If Toccata is implying that the folkloric element in Catalan music has passed from Manén to Marc Migó (born in 1993), then they have backed their case by concentrating on the latter’s folk-inspired recent compositions which, in any case, owe Manén a self-confessed historic debt, alongside such as Granados and Mompou. Like Manen’s Rapsòdia catalana Migó has encoded three Catlan folk songs in Fantasia popular, the clarity of which would have been more overt in the original version for chorus and orchestra. Here we have the purely orchestral revision of 2017. The opening fanfare-like introduction is followed by a compressed sequence of variations on The Nightingale, followed by the drama-laced La dama d’Aragó, the giocoso charm of En Pere Gallerí and then a triumphant coda. This all adds up to twelve minutes of traditional enjoyment, finely played.
The Piano Concertino is even more compressed at ten minutes and has plenty of arpeggio fluidity and deft wind colour. There’s a perpetuum mobile section during which Sergi Pacheco shows his technical qualities but it’s not an overtly bravura-for-bravura’s sake piece, and does even include a bigger, jazzier, Gershwin-inspired section redolent of a Broadway show piece. A demotic if occasionally odd piece.
Epitafi a Hans Rott for strings captures both the introspection and melancholy of Rott’s slow music. Migó’s salute to the memory of the man whose music - and its relatedness to that of Mahler - caused such a stir goes so far as to quote from Rott’s First Symphony.
Far from being recorded in Barcelona, the hardworking National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine is directed by the perceptive Volodymyr Sirenko and has been well recorded in the national radio concert hall.
Jonathan Woolf
Previous review: Philip Buttall
