The New World of the Guitar

The guitar has a wonderfully rich literature of both folk and art music dating back at least to the Renaissance.  In our own time it is enjoying particularly vigorous health as a result of fruitful collaboration between composers and performers.

On this CD Mr. Almeida shows some of the happy results of that collaboration.  He performs works by six twentieth-century composers whose individual styles represent various aspects and adaptations of the musical language of our time.

MARIO CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO

Tarantella & La Guarda Cuydadosa
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was born in Florence in 1895 but lived in California since 1940 where he composed, taught and wrote occasional film scores.  He died in March of 1968.

The list of his works is very long and ranges from grand opera to intimate chamber music.  His music for guitar includes a concerto with orchestra, a quintet with strings, and numerous large and small solo pieces.  The "Tarantella" was composed in 1936 for Segovia and it follows the pattern of the dance - a six-beat rhythm, a quick tempo, an irregular alternation of minor and major sections, with the sections recurring as in a rondo.  Historians are now doubtful about the centuries-old belief that the dance was originally a kind of "physical therapy" for insanity resulting from the bite of the tarantula.  It seems likely that it took its name from the city of Taranto in southern Italy.

"La Guarda Cuydadosa" may be translated as "The Soldier in Love."  The title alone gives as much of a clue to the music as the listener needs in order to account for what happens to the little march tune with which the piece begins.  This is the sixth number of a suite of sixteenth-century Spanish dances that Tedesco composed under the inspiration of Spain's greatest literary figure, Cervantes.

JOHN DUARTE

Miniature Suite
John Duarte was a young Englishman who played, composed for, and wrote articles about the guitar  He was a thorough professional with the enthusiasm of an amateur.  He died in 2004.

The "Miniature Suite" consists of four pieces.  Each is so delicately balanced that it would be extinguished altogether if it were deprived of a single one of its notes or be inflated pretentiously if a single note were added.  No. 1, called "Aeolian Air" is only four phrases long, each phrase lingering over its cadence as though to prolong the pleasure of the sound.  No. 2 is entitled "Cradle Song", and it consists of a melody with a few carefully chosen accompanying chords.  There is a touch of the exotic here, as though the lullaby were a promise of strangely beautiful dreams rather than the routine assurance of maternal watchfulness.  No. 3, "Night Wind on the Heath", is sheer impressionism, a tone poem of such subtle suggestiveness and completeness that one may briefly wonder why twenty minutes and a 100-piece orchestra have come to be the usual trappings for the evocation of such a scene as this one.  The final piece, "Country Dance", has a vigorous tempo, lively tunes, and a drone bass to create the gay bucolic spirit of the title.

ALBERT HARRIS

Sonatina
Albert Harris was born in London in 1916 and was educated in England.  He became an American citizen and lived in the U.S. for nearly twenty years.  He lived in Los Angeles, where he was occupied mostly with composing and arranging for films, records, radio, and television, though he continued to produce concert music in various forms.  His "Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel" was composed for Segovia, who urged him to write a work of somewhat larger dimensions.  The Sonatina is his reply to that invitation.  It is a three-movement piece in the normal fast-slow-fast pattern, with the simplicity and clarity prescribed by the sonatina form.  The real subject matter is musical style, the first movement concerning itself with the musical manners of France in the easy-going 1920's, the second recalling some of the features of the Bach aria, and the third (a rondo) commenting neo-classically on a few of the Mozart-to-Brahms aspect of Viennese classicism.  The music is difficult enough to make severe demands on the performer' technique, but the virtuosity is subtle rather than showy.

JOAQUIN TURINA

Sonata
This too is a three-movement work, but it has the rich colors and volatile emotions of the Spanish music.  Folk song and dance are the roots from which it springs, and they are reflected in the alternation of lyrical and dance-like phrases.  Joaquin Turina's artistic goal was the expression of the national spirit in music, and as a youth he subjected himself to the discipline of a strict academic training in order to equip himself for his life's work.  Together with Manuel de Falla, he carried on the labors of Albeniz and (before him) Pedrell.  Though this Sonata bears no descriptive title, it is as pictorial and poetic as frankly programmatic pieces.  One technical detail is of interest to guitarists:  the low E string is tuned down to D in the outer movements in order to accommodate the bass line in the key of D.

JOAQUIN RODRIGO

En los Trigales
Joaquin Rodrigo was born in 1902 in the small village of Valencia.  Afflicted with blindness from the age of three, he was nevertheless a brilliant student.  Like Albeniz, Falla, and Turina, he went to Paris to complete his education.  He spent his mature years in the native land which is for him, as for many Spanish composers, the very source of inspiration and ideas.  "En los Trigales", meaning, "In the Wheat fields", is one of a set of pieces describing the fields of Spain.  Here the wheat fields, under a light breeze on a summer day, seem to be moving as in a dance.  For Rodrigo, as for Turina, dance and song are so closely identified that one can scarcely exist without the other; and so the wheat fields sing as well as dance.  This highly poetic idea is common to agricultural people; one finds it even in the Bible.

MANUEL PONCE

Preludes
Manuel Ponce was one of Mexico's most illustrious composers, with a large catalogue of works in all forms.  He had a sound academic training in Germany, Italy, and France.  He is most popular in Latin America, through one song, the famous "Estrellita", so widely performed throughout the world that it is often mistaken for a folk song.  Much of his music was inspired by Mexican subjects and couched in a native idiom, but his techniques were European and, in his later years, markedly contrapuntal.  The collection of twelve preludes from which the present six are extracted were composed for Segovia.  Mr. Almeida has selected the six that have never previously been recorded (numbers 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, & 12).  They are small pieces - miniatures in fact - each dealing with but one idea but all having great harmonic interest and highly poetic expressiveness.

LAURINDO ALMEIDA

Laurindo Almeida has achieved fame in widely diversified fields of music by creating beautiful and serious compositions for guitar, by performing brilliantly as solo guitarist with some of the nation's most distinguished jazz bands, and by playing with equal brilliance on the classical concert stage.  His appearances at such places as Carnegie Hall, Chicago's and San Francisco's Civic Opera Houses, and the Hollywood Bowl have been marked by enthusiastic acclaim of his inspired artistry.