 |
|
 |
|
|
Stunning live performances full of Spanish passion
Stokowski performed El Amor Brujo four times with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra - once on 5th January, 1947, and then in three concert in March 1948 (18th, 19th and 21st) - and in each concert the soloist was the mezzo-soprano Nan Merriman. This recording is taken from the last of those concerts; when one hears the intensity and passion that both soloist and musicians bring to this performance, it's tempting to believe they had distilled all the energy of the previous concerts into this one final outing. I've listened to a number of recordings of the same work whilst preparing this restoration and none has the power, passion, and dark Spanish gypsy magic that I find here in this sensational and riveting performance - as perfectly demonstrated in our sample excerpt on this page, Song of Love's Sorrow. I can only believe that this captivating recording has remained unissued due to the sonic shortcomings of the original recording - shortcomings that only a remastering technique such as Pristine's XR process can really tackle. This remastering was sourced from open-reel tapes compiled by Stokowski's assistant, Jack Baumgarten. Both concerts had originally been captured on disc, and both exhibited unusual sonic deficiencies - the tape box has the words "unfocussed sound" pencilled in next to the details of El amor brujo, which is no great surprise as my XR remastering revealed a loss of up to 20dB between 3 and 5kHz, as well as a 15dB drop centred around 550Hz, both of which sucked a huge amount of life out of the recording. A similar frequency loss, about 18dB, was noted above about 4.5kHz in Nights in the Gardens of Spain, leaving a very muffled top end. Restoring these missing frequencies brought both recordings very much to life - the transformation of the first in particular was truly remarkable - but also then required considerable noise reduction targeted at those same frequency ranges as bringing up the music has inevitably also amplified the tape hiss. Both recordings then required extensive close attention to deal with individual defects now revealed by the severe re-equalisation required. The end results do, I hope, speak for themselves, as do these two absolutely wonderful performances.
The Music and its Composer notes from Wikipedia El amor brujo (Love, the Magician) is a piece of music composed by Manuel de Falla. It was initially commissioned in 1914-15 as a gitanería (gypsy piece) by Pastora Imperio, a renowned gypsy dancer, and was scored for voice, actors, and chamber orchestra. Unfortunately, it was barely successful. In 1925, Falla transformed it into a ballet scored for a full symphony orchestra with three short songs for mezzo-soprano. In this form, El amor brujo succeeded. El Amor brujo tells the story of Candela, a gypsy girl, whose love for Carmelo is tormented by the ghost of her faithless former lover. The work is distinctively Andalusian in character with the songs in the Andalusian dialect of the Gypsies. The music contains moments of remarkable beauty and originality and includes the celebrated Ritual Fire Dance and the Dance of Terror. In 1967 Francisco Rovira Beleta directed a film version. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but lost to Jiří Menzel's Closely Watched Trains. However it won the "National Syndicate of Spectacle, Spain" award. In 1986, Spanish director Carlos Saura directed El Amor brujo based on the ballet, starring, and choreographed by, Antonio Gades. It was the third in his trilogy of dance films, following Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding) and Carmen. Unfortunately, it was overlooked in that year's Oscar nominations. The film fleshed out the story with spoken dialogue, but nevertheless used the entire score of the ballet, along with additional songs and dances performed by characters in the film. The Orquesta Nacional de España was conducted by Jesus Lopez-Cobos, and the cante jondo singer heard on the soundtrack was the late Rocio Jurado. A soundtrack album, now out of print, was issued by EMI. The song fuego fatuo ("Will O' The Wisp") was included in the celebrated Miles Davis-Gil Evans collaboration Sketches Of Spain
Nights in the Gardens of Spain (Noches en los Jardines de España) is a piece of music by the Andalusian composer Manuel de Falla (1876-1946). Falla began this work as a set of nocturnes for solo piano in 1909 but on the suggestion of the pianist Ricardo Viñes turned the nocturnes into a piece for piano with orchestra. Falla completed it in 1915 and dedicated it to Ricardo Viñes. The first performance was given on April 9, 1916, at the Teatro Real in Madrid with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid conducted by Enrique Fernández Arbós. The piano part was played by José Cubiles. The work depicts three gardens:
Falla referred to Nights in the Gardens of Spain as "symphonic impressions." The piano part is elaborate, brilliant, and eloquent but rarely dominant. The orchestral writing is lush. It is Falla’s most "impressionistic" score. The score calls for piano, three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, cymbals, triangle, celesta, harp, and strings. Performance time usually runs in the range of 22 to 26 minutes.
Manuel de Falla y Matheu (November 23, 1876 – November 14, 1946) was a Spanish composer of classical music. Manuel de Falla was born in Cádiz. His early teacher in music was his mother; at the age of 9 he was introduced to his first piano professor. Little is known of that period of his life, but his relationship with his teacher was likely conflicted. From the late 1890s he studied music in Madrid, piano with José Tragó and composition with Felipe Pedrell. In 1899 by unanimous vote he was awarded the first prize at the piano competition at his school of music, and around that year he started to use de with his first surname, making de Falla the name he became known as from that time on. It was from Felipe Pedrell, during Madrid period, that de Falla became interested in native Spanish music, particularly Andalusian flamenco (specifically cante jondo), the influence of which can be strongly felt in many of his works. Among his early pieces are a number of zarzuelas, but his first important work was the one-act opera La vida breve (Life is Short, or The Brief Life, written in 1905, though revised before its premiere in 1913). De Falla spent the years 1907 to 1914 in Paris, where he met a number of composers who had an influence on his style, including the impressionists Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Paul Dukas. He wrote little more music, however, until his return to Madrid at the beginning of World War I. While at no stage was he a prolific composer, it was then that he entered into his mature creative period. In Madrid he composed several of his best known pieces, including:
From 1921 to 1939 Manuel de Falla lived in Granada, where he organized the Concurso de Cante Jondo in 1922. In Granada he wrote the puppet opera El retablo de maese Pedro (Master Peter's Puppet Show, 1923) and a concerto for harpsichord and chamber ensemble (1926). The puppet opera marked the first time the harpsichord had entered the modern orchestra; and the concerto was the first for harpsichord written in the 20th Century. Both of these works were written with Wanda Landowska in mind. In these works, the Spanish folk influence is somewhat less apparent than a kind of Stravinskian neo-classicism. Also in Granada, de Falla began work on the large-scale orchestral cantata Atlàntida (Atlantis) based on the Catalan text L'Atlàntida by Jacint Verdaguer, which he considered to be the most important of all his works. Verdaguer's text gives a mythological account of how the submersion of Atlantis created the Atlantic ocean, thus separating Spain and Latin America, and how later the Spanish discovery of America reunited what had always belonged together. De Falla continued work on the cantata after moving to Argentina in 1939. The orchestration of the piece remained incomplete at his death and was completed posthumously by Ernesto Halffter. De Falla tried but failed to prevent the murder of his close friend the poet Federico García Lorca in 1936. Following Francisco Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War, de Falla left Spain for Argentina. He died in Alta Gracia, in the Argentine province of Córdoba. In 1947 his remains were brought back to Spain and entombed in the cathedral at Cádiz. One of the lasting honors to his memory is the Manuel de Falla Chair of Music in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at Complutense University of Madrid. He never married and had no children.
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_de_Falla
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
