Balada: Cello Concerto No. 2 / Concerto For Four Guitars / Celebracio

Description

Leonardo Balada (b. 1933)Concerto for Cello and Orchestra No. 2 Concerto for FourGuitars and Orchestra Born in Barcelona on 22nd September, 1933, Leonardo Baladagraduated at the Conservatorio del Liceu there, and at the Juilliard School in1960. He studied composition with Vincent Persichetti and Aaron Copland andconducting with Igor Markevitch. Since 1970 he has been teaching at CarnegieMellon University in Pittsburgh, where he is University Professor ofComposition. Some of his best known works were written in a dramaticavant-garde style in the 1960s, and he is credited with pioneering a blendingof ethnic music with those avant-garde techniques in later works. Hiscompositions are performed by the world's leading orchestras under the mostdistinguished conductors, and works have been commissioned by many outstandingorganizations in the United States and Europe, with some composed for leading musicians.A large number of his compositions have been recorded by major recordcompanies. Balada's extensive range of works includes, in addition to chamberand symphonic compositions, cantatas, two chamber and three full-length operas,Zapata and Christopher Columbus. He has received several internationalcomposition awards. The Concerto for cello and orchestra No. 2, 'New Orleans'(2001), in two movements, Lament and Swinging, is in the style Balada haspractised during the last three decades. In essence it is a blending of ethnicmusical ideas with avant-garde techniques, a now much-used trend which hepioneered in such works as Sinfonia in Negro-Homage to Martin Luther King(1968) and Homage to Casals and Sarasate (1975). Here his style translates intoa symbiosis of melodic-harmonic Afro-American ideas and tone clusters,aleatoric devices and textural structures. The first movement is slow andlyrical, inspired by Negro spirituals. The soloist sings like a Black voice,introverted, sorrowful, and intensely dramatic. The second movement is virtuosofor the soloist and the orchestra as well. Here the jazzy rhythms appear in afully swinging manner, brilliantly and in an extroverted fashion. The concertowas first given by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in Berlin in 2002conducted by Rafael Fr??hbeck de Burgos with the cellist Michael Sanderling, towhom the work is dedicated.  The Concerto for four guitars and orchestra (1976) is one offour works Balada has composed for guitar and orchestra, itself resulting fromhis Apuntes, a guitar quartet composed in 1974, a suite of several essays withgeometric ideas. These four concertos span the composer's three stylisticperiods. While Concerto No. 1 (1965) falls within the first period,neoclassical in character, Persistencies-Sinfonia Concertante for amplifiedGuitar and Orchestra (1972) and the present concerto fall into the second, hisavant-garde period. The fourth concerto, the 1997 Concierto Magico (Naxos8.555039) belongs to his third period in which ethnic ideas mix with verycontemporary sonorities. The Concer