Guitar Recital: Dejan Ivanovic

Description

Dejan IvanovicGuitar RecitalMatilde Salvador is the widow of Vicente Asencio, who contributed a number of fine works to the guitar repertoire, a composer in her own right. Her suite Homenatge a Mistral is a tribute to the French region of Provence and to the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral and his poem Mireio, published in 1859. Mireio is a twelve-part poem which describes the adventures of the young Mireia, daughter of a rich countryman, whose lover Vicenç is a basket-maker. They want to marry but her parents forbid it because of Vicenç’s relative poverty. Mireia then makes a pilgrimage to Santes Maries de la Mar, crosses the whole of Provence, and dies on arriving in the city of Camarga. The poem sensitively portrays the cities, people and traditions of Provence. A mistral is also a wind, plany is a lament, and a farandola is a popular dance from Provence, also danced in Catalonia. The dancers form long lines and, holding hands, move either in circles or like a snake. The eminent Spanish composer Antón García Abril first studied at the Valencia Conservatory and later in Madrid. His musical style has elements of neo-classicism, romanticism, impressionism, and neo-nationalism, perhaps a successor to Rodrigo, but moving on from him. He has his own voice, a tonal language, if not in its traditional form. His many concertos and solo works for the guitar show a profound understanding of the instrument. The Preludios urbanos are substantial and splendid works, each nominally dedicated to a different city or, more specifically in the first two, to a person associated with it. Preludio de Paris is dedicated to Robert Vidal, the late organizer of an important international guitar competition. The dedicatee of Preludio de Atenas is the Greek guitarist Costas Cotsiolis, and Preludio de Madrid is a tribute to the city in which García Abril pursued his later studies. Frederic Mompou, a Catalan composer, studied the piano in Barcelona and it was on hearing Marguerite Long play piano music by Fauré in 1909 that he was motivated to go to Paris, where he studied the piano and harmony. Realising that his shyness was not compatible with a career as a virtuoso pianist he devoted himself instead to composition, in which he was mainly self-taught. It is then not surprising that his music shows French influences, particularly those of Debussy and Satie. The pairing of canción y danza (song and dance) has been much loved by Spanish composers. Of Mompou’s fourteen works in this form, thirteen were for piano solo; the fourteenth was written for the guitar (1972) and dedicated to Narciso Yepes. The movements have the titles El cant dels ocells (song of the birds) and El bon caçador (the good hunter). The musical talent of Richard Rodney Bennett emerged at an early age. He first studied with Lennox Berkeley and Howard Ferguson, and later with Pierre Boulez who did not persuade h