I'm heading off to Germany for a couple of weeks toward the end of the month. This year I'm not attending a music festival, just going for a vacation. I'll be staying in Dresden in Saxony in the eastern part of Germany. Beautiful town with a lot of cultural history. It was thoroughly bombed in WWII, but has since been rebuilt. I am going to be spending time with friends who live nearby. This is Bach country and I will likely take a trip to Leipzig.
I am planning on buying a guitar there as I don't want to miss two weeks practice time and I am planning a concert when I return in a lovely Tuscan-style villa. The best guitar store in Germany is likely Siccas Guitars in Karlsruhe, but that is the other side of the country so I probably won't make it there. I don't like to travel with my concert guitar so I will just buy a guitar and leave it there for future trips.
Siccas Guitars have a bunch of guitar videos on YouTube. Here is Valeria Galimova playing one of my favorite pieces by Manuel Ponce, the Sonatina Meridional:
I will likely have time to do some posting and I'll put up photos of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig where Bach is buried and visit the Bach Museum.
Sure, let's hear some Bach. This is a better than average video of Segovia playing the Gavotte from the 4th Lute Suite:
All the Ponce sonatas are worthwhile listening. Has anyone done any English-language book-length project on them? I've seen a dissertation in Spanish but considering how foundational these sonatas are to the repertoire I'm kind of surprised there have only been dissertations on a sonata or two at a time and no full-length book out in English about the Ponce sonata cycle.
ReplyDeleteWhat would make the especially handy in theory and history terms is how thoroughly successful they are and how "textbook" their approach to sonata forms tends to be. I've been going through Matiegka's sonatas in the last few years (and Starobin's recent final CD of the Op. 31 is mighty worthy) and it impresses me how anti-textbook Matiegka's approach was. Of course A B Marx hadn't written anything that I'm aware of about sonata form(s) by the time Matiegka wrote his last sonatas circa 1820 but it's been interesting to look at how readily Matiegka would present Theme 1 in whole in the exposition and then slice out all the parts he didn't want to bring back in the recap or how he'd recap in defiantly "wrong" keys for comic effect.
But I digress. I'm incubating a set of posts that will, I hope, go through each and every one of Matiegka's sonata forms later this year.
Yes, they are! Ponce came along at a time when Segovia was struggling to create a viable concert repertory for the guitar. He provided the kind of substantial, multi-movement pieces that became a big part of the repertoire. I have certainly not played all of them, but I have performed many of them: the Sonata Romantica, the Sonatina Meridional, the last movement of Sonata III, and the 20 Variations and Fugue on Folias de España. I also learned the first movement of the Concierto del Sur and performed the Sonata for Guitar and Harpsichord a few times. There is also the Suite in A, in the style of Weiss, the Sonata Clasica in the style of Sor and the Sonata Mexicana.
ReplyDeleteI think that the reason this music has not attracted more theoretical attention is because of the fact that a lot of it is intentionally derivative. In the Sonata Romantica, for example, Ponce was making a conscious effort to write a sonata for guitar in the style of Schubert since Schubert himself failed to do so. Still, I think that a good volume of musicology could be written that could address these and other issues.