Balada: Piano Concerto No. 3 / Concierto Magico

Description

Leonardo Balada (b. 1933)Piano Concerto No.3 * Concierto Mágico * Music for Flute and OrchestraClassical composition of the twentieth century falls into one of two categories: music that contains folk elements and music that does not. Perhaps this differentiation may be of greater importance to the music of the last century than is the great contrast in the various techniques of the time. When we think of Bartók, Stravinsky (the ballets), de Falla, all living and working during the first half of the century, and contrast them with Ligeti, Xenakis or Penderecki, all in the forefront of its second half, the presence or absence of a folk element is what strikes us first. It would not be unfair to claim that the use of folk ideas in the music written after 1950 came to be regarded as shameful in the eyes of the establishment. The feeling was that the use of folk elements in "serious music" was facile, a cheap trick that served as a distraction from the abstractions then in favour.My music of the mid-1960s also reflected that strict philosophy of the time in symphonic works like Guernica, María Sabina, No-res and Steel Symphony, all of them full of drama but nevertheless abstract in their technical content. Yet after ten years, I decided to superimpose folk elements on abstractions. This was a difficult move in the midst of a fundamentalist mentality in the arts. When I composed the opera Christopher Columbus (1984-87) to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas, I faced an enormous challenge owing, in part, to the historic subject. The arrival of Columbus in the Indies signified a new period of experimentation and discovery paving the way to the future. Was my opera to be representative of futuristic ideologies? How obvious! But my concern for what seems to me a world in danger of becoming depleted of ethnic and folk material, in all its rich diversity, drove me to write a work that would, at the same time, point to a technological future while bowing to the greatness of the past. This, in short, is the ideological motivation by which my music, from Sinfonía en Negro-Homage to Martin Luther King(1968) and especially Homage to Casals and Sarasate (1975), is marked. I have been convinced that the use of folk ideas does not need to be facile but, on the contrary, that it is full of challenges. Living in New York during the surrealism of Salvador Dali, with whom I had collaborated several times, the collages of Rauschenberg and the phenomena of "happenings" paved the way to my new style. The three concertos here included belong aesthetically to that period. My Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, No.3, of 1999, is an example of a symbiosis between the past and the future which I have been practicing for three decades. One can see textural writing, blunt contrast of ideas and dynamics, juxtaposition of clustered and traditional harmonies, canon-like mechanistic passages in layers of "staccato" writin