Alexandre Tansman - Complete Works for Solo Guitar Vol.2

Alexandre TANSMAN (1897-1986)

Complete Works for Solo Guitar Vol. 2

Ballade 'Hommage à Chopin'

Deux chansons populaires

Hommage a Chopin

Inventions 'Hommage à Bach'

Pezzo in modo antivo

Piece en forme de Passacaille

Prelude & Interlude

Suite for guitar

Variations on a Theme of Scriabin

Andrea De Vitis (guitar)

Recorded: October 24, 2018 - October 26, 2018

St. Paul's Church, Newmarket, Ontario, Canada

Complete Works for Solo Guitar • 2: ‘A sign of friendship’

Like many composers from the first half of the 20th century, Alexandre Tansman (12 June 1897, Łodź, Poland–15 November 1986, Paris, France) became interested in the guitar after meeting the Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia (1893–1987). They met at a dinner which had been organized by Henry Prunieres as one of the activities of the journal he edited, La Revue musicale. The dinner guests included Maurice Ravel, Albert Roussel, Florent Schmitt, and the members of the Groupe des Six. At the end of the meal, Prunieres asked Segovia to play the guitar for them. Many years later, Tansman recalled, ‘I expected a Spanish guitarist to play some flamenco and instead I heard Bach’s Chaconne! I was overwhelmed by the Maestro’s performance’. Segovia probably didn’t realise the symbolic value this Bach composition had for Tansman: in fact, Tansman had decided to dedicate his life to music after attending a concert during which Eugene Ysaye performed this famous piece. The composer expressed all his admiration and interest to Segovia and offered to write a work for guitar for him. A short while later, the Mazurka was born, and Segovia soon performed it during a concert at the Conservatory in Paris. The composition was later published as a musical supplement in the May 1926 issue of La Revue musicale (the same journal which had published Manuel de Falla’s Homenaje the year before). That dinner marked the beginning of a friendship which only ended with Tansman’s death in 1986. Of the various authors who composed for Segovia, Tansman is the one who most openly distanced himself from the Spanish-American cliches which, at the time, seemed the only kind of guitar music possible. Tansman was certainly not the only one to do so but, as opposed to other composers and despite this stylistic choice, he immediately entered the Spanish guitarist’s heart and—consequently—his repertory, to the point that he represents ‘Segovia’s most advanced commitment to modern music’. (A. Gilardino, Manuale di storia della chitarra).

Alexandre Tansman’s legacy for the guitar ranges over a particularly long time frame: 57 years passed between his first composition, the Mazurka from 1925, and his final one, Hommage à Lech Wałęsa, written in 1982. During this period, the Polish-French composer wrote new pieces for the guitar almost uninterruptedly, with the exception of the period 1925–45, the two decades which passed between his first and second guitar compositions. This silence is in part explained by the fact that Tansman and Segovia were separated by wars and racial persecutions in Europe which forced the two musicians into exile in the Americas. Aside from that period, Tansman wrote, on average, a new composition for guitar every two or three years. He created this opus almost exclusively as a sign of his friendship for Andres Segovia: none of the other famous guitarists who played his music had so many pieces written for them and only on two occasions did he compose guitar music which wasn’t destined for the Spanish guitarist. The first time was in 1970 when, upon the request of Angelo Gilardino, he wrote Pezzo in modo antico; the second in 1982, when Corazon Otero and Fernando Pereznieto (a Mexican painter he particularly admired) asked him to write Hommage à Lech Wałęsa, his last concert piece.

Until Tansman and Segovia died (in 1986 and 1987, respectively), Alexandre Tansman’s contribution to the guitar repertory was considered valuable but quantitatively limited. But starting in 1991, many pieces came to light which Segovia hadn’t included in his concert repertory and which, with Tansman’s consent, had been set aside and forgotten. The number of pieces which surfaced in Tansman’s personal archive and the archive of the Fundacion Andres Segovia exceed those which had been known until that moment and, as a result, Alexandre Tansman’s opus for guitar is now considered one of the most important of the 20th century, for the cultural and expressive variety of the compositions and the fruitful inspiration these compositions often reveal.

This unabridged recording, entrusted to the Italian guitarist Andrea De Vitis and the nuances of a magnificent instrument built by the Parisian luthier Daniel Friederich (guitar no. 101 from 1963), does not follow the chronological order of the compositions and has been divided into two albums according to the composer’s inspirational sources and cultural reference points. De Vitis has also meticulously researched Tansman’s original manuscripts, resolving many doubts and omissions which can be found in the printed editions.

This album brings together the works which reference Alexandre Tansman’s favourite musicians of the past, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach and Tansman’s fellow countryman, Fryderyk Chopin. It also features references to folk music; the music of Alexander Scriabin, who was a close friend of the Tansmans, and Baroque music.

Tansman and Segovia’s friendship was not only evident in their artistic collaborations, they also spent long periods together, for example during summer vacations. Two movements of Inventions, which Tansman wrote in September 1967 in tribute to Bach, date back to a short vacation he took in Los Olivos, Andalusia, the summer residence of Segovia and his wife, Emilita Corral de Segovia. This suite was composed as an affectionate thank you to the couple for their hospitality. Tansman didn’t try to imitate the formal rigour and contrapuntal perfection of Bach’s famous Inventions for harpsichord; instead, he elaborated a free contamination between counterpoint and dance rhythms. The result is an original work whose interpretation goes well beyond mere instrumental execution and proves to be particularly complex on a stylistic level.

In 1965, he wrote Ballade in tribute to Fryderyk Chopin: the piece, Tansman’s most wide-ranging single movement for guitar, sank into oblivion (it was only published in 1998) but Segovia used it as a pretext to request three more pieces from the composer (Prelude, Nocturne, and Valse romantique), which were published in 1968 as Hommage à Chopin. The Ballade is difficult on an instrumental level and proved to be Tansman’s most imaginative piece for guitar. A long and episodic composition, it is based on a form which was dear to Chopin but unusual in the guitar repertory and requires the performer to quickly pass from one instrumental and expressive mood to another.

The Suite in six movements (Notturno romantico, Alla polacca, Canzonetta, Invenzione, Berceuse d’Orient, Segovia) dates back to 1956. It was unpublished for many years and Segovia extracted three pieces from it which he published under the title Trois pièces, recorded in 1958, and included in 1962 in his Suite in modo polonico. The complete version was recently found in two handwritten copies, one in the archive of the Tansman family and the other in the Segovia Foundation archive. The Suite was conceived as a musical portrait of Segovia, whose name is used for the final, Spanish-style movement: the suite has moderate movements (Notturno romantico, Canzonetta, Berceuse d’Orient) which illustrate his extraordinary sound and elegant, romantically expressive phrasing; it also features brilliant pieces, one inspired by Poland, the other by Spain, to highlight Segovia’s ability—which Tansman considered superb—to ennoble folk songs and dances.

In 1955, Segovia asked Tansman to write a series of preludes: the composer limited himself to writing the diptych Prélude et Interlude, which Segovia found unsuitable for the guitar, despite his attempt to make it more playable by changing the key. The diptych, which was recently found among Segovia’s papers, has a very free harmonic language which was foreign to the dedicatee’s aesthetics. The first piece, which is fairly articulated, rhapsodic, and passionate, is in A–B–A form and finds its resolution in the expressive tension of the regular and serene pace of the very short Interlude, which could be more appropriately entitled Postlude.

In 1971, Tansman worked on two pieces which were diametrically opposite on a stylistic level and dedicated to two of his closest friends: Stèle in memoriam Igor Stravinsky for large orchestra, a cry of pain for the recent death of the Russian composer; and Variations sur un thème de Scriabine for guitar, a pleasant piece requested by his now elderly friend who, a few years earlier, had transcribed and recorded Alexander Scriabin’s Preludio, Op. 16, No. 4. In his Variations, the composer wrote a transposition for guitar of Scriabin’s complex intertwining for piano which oblige the performer to exhibit a level of fingering skill which is rare in the guitar repertory.

Pièce en forme de passacaille, written in 1953, is a broadranging composition which was recently discovered after almost 50 years of oblivion in the archives of the Segovia Foundation. It is based on an ostinato and ten variations, which is then re-proposed six more times in an instrumentally complex fugato. This masterful composition is a perfect synthesis of the solemnity of the Baroque style and the subtly flexible harmony—alternately mobile and static—of Tansman’s music. Starting with the exposition of the bass ostinato, the composition uses a bass D sharp which obliges the performer to tune the sixth string in D, even though the piece is in E minor: the scordatura, which is, in itself, customary, seemed tonally unorthodox to Segovia and he therefore decided not to perform it. Above and beyond the appearances, this is one of Tansman’s few guitar compositions in which he paid evident attention to the piece’s effective performability: its sound is clear and spontaneous and few adjustments are needed for its correct execution. The Passacaille also represents one of Tansman’s few concessions to a typical effect of the guitar, the tremolo, which is used here as a dramatic, expressive resource and not, as is usually the case, as a purely ornamental effect.

In 1970, upon the request of Angelo Gilardino, who at the time was creating his series dedicated to contemporary music for guitar, edited by Berben, Tansman returned to a piece he had already begun, Pavane et Rigaudon, whose first movement, Pezzo in modo antico, was published one year later. In this short but intense adagio in neo-Baroque style, the author masterfully created a sophisticated exercise in style.

Written in 1978, the Deux Chansons populaires are the last composition he dedicated to Segovia and are based on two Catalonian themes (Canco de Lladre and the tragic Plany) which are familiar to guitarists the world over thanks to the arrangements by Miguel Llobet.

Frédéric Zigante