Joaquin Nin-Culmell
apparently referred to his family as the “nineses”. It was a
remarkable family. Outside the musical environment of a web
site such as this, the most famous member of the family was
probably Anais Nin (1903-1977), avant-garde novelist, outspoken
diarist, bigamist, writer of soft-porn, lover of Henry Miller
and others. She was the daughter of the older of these two composers
- and claimed that she had an incestuous affair with her father
- and brother of the younger.
Both composers led
cosmopolitan lives. The father was born in Cuba, his mother
a Cuban his father a Catalan soldier. Soon after his birth the
family took up residence in Barcelona. Later, around the age
of twenty, Joaquin returned to Cuba, where he married Rosa Culmell,
a soprano and daughter of a wealthy Cuban family. Husband and
wife spent time in both Paris and Cuba. Anais was born in Paris,
a son called Thorwald in Cuba and the future composer - Joaquin
Nin-Culmell - in Berlin. Nin the elder
was a spectacularly unfaithful husband who had many affairs
and in 1912 he abandoned his wife and children completely (setting
off in pursuit of a 16 year old girl). He made a good career
for himself as a pianist and mixed in expatriate Spanish music
circles in Paris, in the company of figures such
as Turina, Granados and Albéniz. He was also active as a musicologist,
undertaking important editorial work on Soler, for example.
He later returned to Cuba, where he died.
The abandoned wife
took her children, including the young Joaquin to New
York; he returned to Europe in his mid
teens and studied with Manuel de Falla, as well as at the Paris
Conservatoire. In 1939 he returned to America,
taking up a sequence of teaching positions at American universities,
eventually taking up a post at the university of Berkeley in 1950, where he remained
until his retirement in 1974. Through all these years he also
sustained a career as a pianist, in both America
and Europe.
For all the internationalism
of the lives they lived, the music of both father and son was
consistently imbued with a thoroughly Spanish air. The characteristic
ternary rhythms, some debts to the folk-song tradition, some
typical melodic lines and patterns of phrasing – these and other
elements are so evident as to make it sensible to think of both
father and son as ‘Spanish’ composers, even if their work also,
naturally, reveals their familiarity with other musical traditions
too.
This present CD
is largely devoted to the music of the younger Nin. His father
is represented by just two pieces, a solo piano piece and a
work for Female choir and piano. The older Nin’s piano music
deserves to be much better known than it is – more can be heard
on Thomas Tirino’s recording of the Complete Piano Works (Koch
3-7516-2). The ‘mensaje’ (message) he addresses to Debussy
is clearly one of respect and admiration – this interesting
and striking work draws both on Nin’s Spanish inheritance and
on his familiarity with the keyboard music of French impressionism
and it fuses the two traditions very attractively. It might,
I suppose, be seen as a kind of reply to Debussy’s ‘Spanish’
works such as ‘La Soirée dans Grenade’ and ‘Iberia’.
The two cançons for female voices and piano are versions
of traditional Catalan Christmas songs, richly – and attractively
– harmonised.
Joaquin
Nin-Culmell as represented by a greater range of music, ranging
in date from 1952 to 1998. The earliest works here, all dating
from the 1950s, are the most explicit in their exploitation
of the musical traditions of Catalonia. The twelve Cançons
Tradicionals Catalanes are very fine and they get an utterly
sympathetic and perceptive performance from Assumpta Mateu,
ably supported by Pau Casan (whose work is everywhere exemplary
on this CD). Mateu understands perfectly the idioms of the music
and does full justice to these subtle and passionate songs.
Anyone who likes the songs of, say, Turina or De Falla but is
unfamiliar with these settings by Nin-Culmel is strongly urged
to make their acquaintance. Full texts of these, and the other
vocal works, are provided, but not English translations. The
four Cançons Tradicionals Harmonitzades for a capella
choir take simple texts and folk melodies and treat them with
considerable harmonic sophistication and freedom, not least
in the expressive harmonies of the second song, ‘El Niño Perdido’.
The six Tonadas Catalanes are delightful elaborations
(but never over elaborations) of traditional songs and dances,
sparkling and piquant miniatures, played with freshness and
delicious clarity by Pau Casan – a native of Barcelona, though
his postgraduate piano studies were with Gordon Fergus-Thompson
and Roger Vignoles.
Of the later works
by Nin-Culmell, the ‘Homenaje a Frederic Mompou’ is a
stylistically fitting tribute to another native of Barcelona
who spent many of his musically formative years in Paris. More
substantial is the Missa Brevis, which omits the Credo.
It was written for the wedding of the composer’s niece-grand-daughter
and is characteristically accomplished piece of work, harmonically
sophisticated and expressive, sometimes in ways which remind
one of idioms of modern French sacred music. As so often with
the music – and indeed the writings – of the “nineses”, one
is led back to Paris, even though Nun-Culmell spent so much
of his life in the U.S.A.
At the web site
of the Regional
Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library of the University
of California, one can access lengthy transcripts of interviews
with Joaquin Nin-Culmell, conducted just two years before his
death. In them he talks of his family, of working with de Falla,
of friendship with Messiaen, of studying with Cortot and Dukas
(“an extraordinary, cultivated man who could talk about French
poets as well as he could and sometimes better than he could
about music”) and much, much else. When the family history of
the Nins comes to be written, as it surely will, the music of
both father and son, and their involvement in the musical life
of two continents will surely rank alongside, or above, Anais
Nin’s achievement as a writer.
Glyn Pursglove