Joaquín Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez and works by Francisco Coll & Pete Harden Jacob Kellermann London Philharmonic Orchestra • Norrbotten NEO Christian Karlsen BIS-2485 RODRIGO, Joaquín (1901—99) Concierto de Aranjuez (1939) (Schott Music) 22'30 for guitar and orchestra 1 I. Allegro con spirito 6'03 2 II. Adagio Sue Böhling cor anglais 11'32 3 III. Allegro gentile 4'54 COLL, Francisco (b. 1985) Turia (2017), concerto for guitar and ensemble (Faber Music) 18'25 4 I. q = 82 5'54 5 II. q = 120 2'08 6 III. q = 52 3'23 7 IV. q = 60 4'32 8 V. q. = 60 2'10 de FALLA, Manuel (1876—1946) 9 Homenaje (Le tombeau de Debussy) (1920) 3'20 for solo guitar ALBÉNIZ, Isaac (1860—1909) 10 Evocación from Iberia (1905) 6'03 arranged for ensemble by Christian Karlsen 2 HARDEN, Pete (b. 1979) 11 Solace and Shimmer (2016) (Manuscript) 12'13 for guitar and ensemble TT: 63'42 Jacob Kellermann guitar [1—3] London Philharmonic Orchestra Leader: Pieter Schoeman [4—8, 10, 11] Norrbotten NEO Christian Karlsen conductor Instrumentarium: Guitar: Matthias Dammann Norrbotten NEO Piano: Mårten Landström Clarinet: Robert Ek Flute: Sara Hammarström Violin: Brusk Zanganeh (Coll, Harden); Daniel Migdal (Albéniz) Viola: Kim Hellgren Cello: Elemér Lavotha (Coll, Harden); Erik Wahlgren (Albéniz) Percussion: Ulrik Nilsson (Coll, Harden); Marcus Ström (Albéniz) 3 n 1960, Miles Davis issued a famously leftfield album that took as its starting point Joaquín Rodrigo’s guitar concerto, the Concierto de Aranjuez. Davis’s ISketches of Spain proved controversial: the country filtered through a certain lens, and Davis’s musicianship moved to a different technical as well as geo- graphical terrain. But for six decades, the album has held a degree of fascination, as much for its sound as for the central question it poses: can a musician paint a picture of a country in sound – and from afar? The album you hold in your hands, inspired by Sketches of Spain, seeks to imag- ine the country ‘as if through a prism – as a concept rather than a place’, according to its instigators Jacob Kellermann and Christian Karlsen. They hail from a land as far from Spain as it’s possible to get while remaining in Europe: cold, Lutheran Sweden. The album’s starting point is Rodrigo’s concerto and yet at the same time, it isn’t. That piece was the last to fall into the programme. The album sprang instead from two new works that look at Spain in metaphorical terms, yet drill deep into its musical and topological DNA – a retort to what Kellermann refers to as the ‘mis- treatment’ of the country by legions of foreign composers down the centuries. But first, the Concierto de Aranjuez. Its composer Joaquín Rodrigo, blind from the age of three, recreated a distinctly Spanish ambience in his works, one ‘where folklore is a picturesque element’ (to borrow a phrase from the musicologist Tomás Marco). Rodrigo wrote the piece in Madrid in 1939, the first and best of his several concertante works involving the guitar and one that appeared to console a Spain wounded by a civil war. The concerto was conceived as a picture of court life around the turn of the nine- teenth century at the royal palace and gardens of Aranjuez, between Madrid and Toledo. Its outer movements are animated by strong rhythms: the first assuming the form of a march, the last with the flavour of a rococo-style courtly dance linking bars of two and three beats. But the concerto’s heart is its Adagio, the move ment 4 reimagined by Davis. Induced by the orchestra’s cor anglais, the soloist sings a plaintive melody whose strength is in inverse proportion to its volume. ‘There is some thing intuitive about that melody which is just a stroke of genius’, says Keller- mann. Long before Miles Davis turned his attentions to it, the Concierto de Aranjuez was accepted into the repertoire as the first modern guitar concerto. But its presence on this album was made obligatory by the two new scores included: one sampling its most famous kernel of music, the other sharing its geographical roots. Like Joaquín Rodrigo, Francisco Coll is a native of Valencia. He studied there and at con servatories in Madrid and London as well as privately with Thomas Adès (he was the British composer’s first pupil). Coll’s home country has been a consistent feature in his music; he made his BBC Proms début in 2016 with Four Iberian Miniatures, conducted by Adès. Turia was commissioned jointly by Kellermann and Karlsen. Its title refers to the river that once flowed through Valencia, its dried-out bed now given over to gardens, cafés, and even the city’s new opera house. ‘As a child… I used to walk in this unusual river, full of light, flowers and people’, writes Coll in his own pro- gramme note. His five-movement concerto for guitar and ensemble sets out to ‘evoke the light and the respective shadows’ of his country. Coll has also described the piece as ‘my most flamenco-coloured work yet’ – wherein lies, for Kellermann, its fascination. ‘Francisco has dug deeper than the standard, clichéd idea of flamenco which is common to most classical composers, even Spanish ones,’ says the guitarist. ‘This score is clearly aware of the depth and cosmopolitanism of flamenco which, like Spain, is a blend of so many elements: Arabic music, Jewish music, Christian music and gypsy music. Francisco explores the deeper harmony, modus and feeling of the genre. More obviously there are flamenco-derived turns of phrase, a generally more percussive sound and frequent 5 rasgueado instructions [a particular sort of strumming, using the fingernail and associated with the flamenco tradition]. But the heart of the piece is rather one of darkness, bringing to mind the poetry of Lorca – what happens after the sun goes down.’ There is intensity, whimsy and philosophical potency in Coll’s taut concerto, whose language also references brutalism and funk. It is determinedly rooted on the lower strings of the guitar (and piano), which keep it pinned down even as the ensemble, finally, takes flight. At its first performance in December 2017, Turia shared the bill with another score commissioned by the parties performing here: Solace and Shimmer, by the British composer Pete Harden. Harden, himself a guitarist, studied composition in Holland with Louis Andriessen and Richard Ayres. ‘We commissioned Pete in order to hear a voice from the outside in a programme that was ostensibly about Spain, with his closeness to jazz and non-classical traditions proving all the more reason’, says Christian Karlsen. Harden describes his piece for guitar and ensemble as ‘an impressionist ode to dry, southern European heat.’ It is also anchored in Spain’s musical past, using as its chassis the series of chords that underpins the slow movement of Rodrigo’s concerto – but here slowed down, stretched out and played on a guitar tuned partially to quarter-tones that gives those chords a wobble, a shimmer. The fundamental objective, in the composer’s own words, was to ‘conjure a vision of the dreamy calm that a semi-shaded, sun- dappled heat can bring, with shimmering chords and occasional fluttering birdsong.’ The piece radiates heat: wind instruments exhale heavily and strings produce glis- tening, hazy harmonics in response to the guitar’s steady strumming. ‘It’s an abstract painting in comparison to everything else included here, presenting Spain as an idea rather than an actual place’, explains Karlsen; ‘we start with one of the most iconic ‘Spanish’ pieces in the repertoire and end with a tilted look at the country.’ 6 But there is a transition, in the form of two classical scores from Spanish com- posers that demonstrate something of an ambivalence towards the country. Manuel de Falla, born in Cádiz and trained in Madrid, was more responsible than anyone for capturing the essence of Spain in music, inspired mostly by his beloved Anda- lucía. But his 1920 Homenaje is a tribute to the French composer Claude Debussy (whose Soirée dans Grenade it quotes in its final bars) and is better known in its arrangement for piano than in the original guitar version heard here. Isaac Albéniz settled in France, but was never anything other than a Spanish composer. His works captured the landscapes, moods and attitudes of his country and his monumental piano cycle Iberia does so more densely and deeply than any- thing else he wrote. The first piece of Iberia’s Book 1 was titled ‘Prelude’ in the manu script but soon labelled Evocación, probably given its haunting and decidedly long-view of ‘eternal’ Spain – its landscape and people – rendered by means of in- tricate harmonies fluttering over pedal notes, rhythmic syncopations and cumulative climaxes. There can be few more evocative views of the country than this, even when in the hands of northern Europeans. ‘As a guitarist, I somehow feel that this is “my music” even though I did not grow up anywhere near Spain’, says Keller- mann. Nor, of course, did Karlsen. ‘Scandinavians have long had an idea of Spain as somewhere that, for most of the year, has everything we don’t have’, he says. But in Evocación, and particularly in his own resourceful arrangement of it, nothing is quite as it seems. © Andrew Mellor 2020 7 The Swedish-born Jacob Kellermann has established himself as one of the most active guitarists of his generation. Regularly performing at major Swedish venues, he has appeared internationally in venues including Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Prinzregententheater and Gasteig Munich, Tokyo Bunkakaikan, Seoul Art Center and Brucknerhaus Linz.