Joan Manén - Violin Concerto No.2; Oboe Concerto

Joan MANÉN (1883-1971) 

Concerto nº 2 (da Camera) per a violí i orquestra de corda amb arpa, op. A-24

Concert per a oboè i orquestra op. A- 39

Kai Gleusteen, violin

Eduardo Martínez, oboè

Orquestra de Cambra Terrassa 48

Xavier Puig, director

The composers who revived Spanish music in modern times usually had a nationalist agenda—one thinks especially of Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909), the Catalan Enrique Granados (1867–1916), Manuel de Falla (1876– 1946) and Joaquín Turina (1882–1949). All four had the piano as their main instrument, the first two being major virtuosi. One year younger than Turina, and destined to be much less well known, was the Catalan Joan Manén, who played the piano well but was a virtuoso violinist and, despite attaching the description ‘Ibérica’ to some compositions , did not intend his music to have a narrow nationalist focus.

In his day, Joan Manén was almost as famous as his fellow Catalan Pablo Casals. He made the first recording of the Beethoven Concerto, gave more than 4,000 concerts or recitals and travelled round the world five times. He continued the tradition of the violinist-composer well into the 20th century, winning respect for his concertos, ballets, symphonies and operas. Born in Barcelona on 14 March 1883, he started learning theory, solfège and piano at three with his father, a keen amateur of music, after Manén senior discovered he had perfect pitch. Local fiddlers of varying competence gave him violin lessons from the age of five, but failed to instil in him a love for the instrument. He turned to the piano as an escape, playing through operatic scores and Bach preludes and fugues. ‘The piano was one daily hour of diversion and the violin was one unbearable hour a day,’ he later wrote. For his own amusement he learnt Chopin’s E minor Concerto but kept up the violin well enough to play both instruments at his debut in Castellón, when he was seven. Around this time he began lessons with Clemente Ibarguren, a Barcelona violinist who had studied in Paris with Delphin Alard, Sarasate’s teacher. Soon he was touring Spain as a pianistic prodigy but when he appeared at the Palace in Madrid before Queen María Cristina and the Infanta Doña Isabel de Borbón, he played violin pieces as well as Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses for piano. He toured Argentina as a piano and violin soloist and conducted his first symphonic concert in Buenos Aires aged ten. Back in Barcelona, he began to study the Beethoven and Mendelssohn concertos in earnest. He then toured Cuba and Mexico—in all, he made three major tours of South and Central America between the ages of 11 and 14.

Manén’s United States debut, at the Mendelssohn Glee Club in New York on 15 November 1896 with his father at the piano, featured Wieniawski’s Faust Fantasy, the first movement of the Mendelssohn Concerto, the Andante from the Symphonie espagnole and his own Jota (adapted from Caballero’s Duo de la Africana). On 15 January 1897 he played the complete Lalo (minus Intermezzo) in Carnegie Hall with Walter Damrosch conducting; Eugène Ysaÿe and César Thomson took part in the same concert. This period saw Manén’s first compositions—able to compose without using a piano, he could write music while on tour. So 1897 also saw him give the premiere of his Concierto español (dedicated ‘À mon ami Mons. Fritz Kreisler’) at the Teatro Lírico, Barcelona. In 1898 he began to tour Europe and that December made his Paris orchestral debut, performing the Beethoven Concerto with his own cadenzas at the Concerts Colonne. In Warsaw he played his own Concierto español and Caprices Nos. 1 and 2, as well as his orchestral version of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24, with the Philharmonic under Emil Młynarski: after he slipped in Wieniawski’s Souvenir de Moscou, despite an interdict on Polish works by the ruling Russians, some of the audience carried him shoulder-high to his hotel. In March 1899 he played Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy at the composer’s house in Friedenau, with Bruch at the piano; and the following year he had Richard Strauss as accompanist for a recital in Cologne. At Fritz Simrock’s house Manén played Dvořák’s Sonata with the composer as pianist. He was beginning to be recognised as a composer apart from the violin, with premieres of a zarzuela, El Suplici de Tàntalo; his symphony Nova Catalonia; his first opera Juana de Nápoles; his piano quartet Mobilis in Mobile; and within a year his second opera Acté. In Madrid he played his new edition of Paganini’s B minor Concerto, with its celebrated finale La campanella. Sometimes he conducted, as in a performance of Grieg’s Piano Concerto with Teresa Carreño.

Manén considered that his career really took off with the recitals he gave at the Berlin Hochschule in November 1904, when critics hailed him as the best violinist of his time. Especially after his tyrannical father’s death from typhus in 1908, his life opened up: that year his opera Acté, which had had a rather lukewarm premiere in Barcelona in 1904, was produced in Dresden to acclaim. In the turbulent years before the First World War he was one of the best-known fiddlers, lauded throughout Europe and playing for all the crowned heads. His London debut came in 1910 at the Bechstein (now Wigmore) Hall, with Mozart’s D major Concerto, K. 218. Two years later he took Queen’s Hall by storm with the same Mozart, Saint- Saëns’s B minor, both Beethoven Romances and his own Introduction, Andante and Variations on a Theme of Tartini. He had an impressive platform manner—Sir Henry Wood, the conductor on that occasion, described him as ‘a deeply attractive personality … a Spanish violinist who, in those days, rivalled even the great Sarasate. Manén was certainly one of the most wonderful-looking men I ever set eyes on. He was dark and bearded, with an aesthetic expression that made me think he would have been an ideal sitter for the 16th-century painter Velasquez. He had a marvellous technique and was a composer of considerable distinction’.

During the Great War, Manén lost all his savings, and to recoup his finances in 1919–20 he toured extensively through South and Central America, following up with a long US sojourn in 1921–25. In the late 1920s he pursued a fulfilling career, but he was essentially a 19th-century violinist and by then Jascha Heifetz had set new standards. In his memoirs, Joseph Szigeti named Manén with other ‘players of the first decade of our century’—Henri Marteau, Felix Berber, César Thomson and Arrigo Serato—who did not sustain their US careers in the interwar years. During the 1930s Manén’s activities were confined to Europe and by 1938 Sir Henry Wood was writing: ‘He played again only a year or two ago, but I think he has lost some of his fascination, or perhaps it is that so many violinists of distinction have appeared in the meantime.’ Conversely, in that same year Le Journal in Paris praised the ‘clarity, sobriety and charm’ of his interpretations. One sign of the decline in his pulling power was that he made no ‘official’ electric records, although there were a slew of tapes for German Radio. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he went into internal exile; and on the outbreak of the Second World War he moved to Estoril in Portugal with his family, at first concentrating on composing and writing his memoirs. In 1941–42 he toured wartime Germany and Austria, and in 1942 he performed in Barcelona for the first time in seven years. In 1945 Manén returned to Barcelona, there to remain for the rest of his life. In 1948 he resumed his international career and when he returned to the US in 1950, he was still playing magnificently, as live recordings attest. He went on performing until 1959, when he was 76. Although now cleanshaven, he remained a dignified figure and sporadic successes still came his way. Yet when he died in Barcelona on 26 June 1971, few attended the funeral. He is commemorated by a square in Ciudadela on Menorca and a street in Barcelona.

Joan Manén wrote in all the accepted forms: his compositions (issued by at least ten publishers) include seven operas (three of them a Don Juan trilogy); two ballets; nine orchestral works, two of them symphonies; numerous works for soloist and orchestra, including three concertos, a concertino and five other pieces for violin; as well as chamber, instrumental, vocal and choral works. He made many arrangements and transcriptions. He wrote all his opera librettos except the first one, produced a number of books, contributed to many journals and founded the review Música.