I played a brief concert in November and I'm planning to do another in the near future. This was after a few years of no public performances. So now I find myself thinking about programming. This is a fairly important subject, but I don't think people talk about it too much. I recall the head of the performance department at McGill saying to me once "put your best piece at the beginning of the second half." Ok, makes sense I guess. But I honestly can't recall anyone else ever saying a thing about programming except maybe a few isolated remarks on encores and what one should and shouldn't play as an encore.
So, it might be worth while to talk about programming. In the past, especially when I was at McGill, I did some hefty programs. For my third year performance exam I did the Bach 4th Lute Suite, the Ponce Sonata romantica and the Tedesco Concerto in D. Whew! Later concert programs played as a performance requirement might start with some vihuela music, continue with the Hungarian lute composer Bakfark, some Scarlatti sonatas, Villa-Lobos etudes and maybe a concerto with piano accompaniment.
I used to play a lot of Latin American music by composers other than Villa-Lobos like Manuel Ponce, Agustin Barrios, Antonio Lauro and Leo Brouwer (though he is more modernist than Latin American). Apart from Ponce, I have pretty much let that repertoire go. Especially Astor Piazzolla. I went through a brief, though intense, bout of playing his music but now I avoid it like the plague. Not entirely sure why, but there seem to be two and only two moods/atmospheres and I don't like either of them! And, with the exception of Ponce, most Latin American composers seem pretty shallow, though not, I guess, Ginastera.
I used to play quite a bit of Fernando Sor and considerably less of Mauro Giuliani. While I still find Sor to be both charming and agreeable, I don't have much desire to play his music and even less to play Giuliani. Tarrega? Apart from the Capricho Arabe, what is there? Mertz and Regondi leave me a bit cold. The problem is that their music is embarrassingly slight compared to their contemporaries who wrote for piano.
The repertoire took a great leap forward with the arrival of Segovia who inspired Moreno Torroba, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and a host of others like Turina and Mompou to write for guitar. And there are some fine pieces there. In recent years I have especially found Torroba to be an outstanding composer for guitar with lots of tuneful character pieces that are very enjoyable. The Four Short Pieces by Frank Martin are very fine.
The next generation of players, Julian Bream and John Williams, inspired a new generation of composers and music by Benjamin Britten, Lennox Berkeley, Hans Werner Henze and others is well worth your time.
Joaquin Rodrigo is in a category of his own as the composer of a really terrific concerto and quite a few remarkable solo pieces.
But the truth is that there is only one truly great composer that we can successfully play on guitar and that is J. S. Bach, of course. He never wrote a note for guitar, but his lute music (and music only purportedly for the lute), and his solo cello and violin music adapts excellently for guitar.
Now sure, there are innumerable transcriptions from Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, Chopin and others for guitar, but, with the exception of the piano music of Albeniz and Granados, they really just illustrate why they don't actually work on guitar.
So what will my next brief program consist of? Just two pieces, the Sonatina meridional of Manuel Ponce and the Chaconne of Bach. The Bach is one of the greatest pieces ever written, of course, and the Ponce is a delightful piece rich in melodic and harmonic interest. The problem is, which order to play them in...
What do you think about programme length? Especially post-covid, the trend here is for shorter concerts, sometimes with no interval. I don't know to what extent this is true elsewhere in the world though.
ReplyDeleteI confess I like the idea of Sor's music more than the actual music, at least with the larger works. And I agree about Mertz and Regondi. I would put in a word for Matiegka (if Wenatchee hasn't already brought him to your attention on a previous occasion!), particularly the Op. 31 sonatas -- which just got an exemplary recording by David Starobin. I'm currently going over the fifth for a couple of performances. Not groundbreaking, but fine and delightful music nonetheless. And more Haydesque than Beethovenian, which is my preference both generally and moreover for the guitar specifically.
Just realised -- you didn't mention Takemitsu! My dream guitar recital would be the complete solo works by Takemitsu, maybe with some of the chamber works with guitar in a second half, or perhaps the other way round. But every guitar recital I've been to seems to go for variety rather than a narrow theme, let alone focusing on a single composer.
Yes, the trend is definitely towards shorter programs. I saw Segovia play a program in the mid-70s that had nearly an hour of music in each half--and then he played eight encores! You would never see that today. My typical program length when I was active was probably forty minutes in the first half and thirty-five or so in the second with maybe one encore. What I see with other instruments and artists is programs that are about thirty to forty minutes for each half. But encores are rare these days! Except for Sokolov, of course, who plays fifty or sixty minutes each half and follows that with six encores!
ReplyDeleteI retired as a solo concert artist a long time ago so what I am doing now is just brief private concerts by invitation only, so not to be taken as any kind of model. I am aiming for about thirty minutes for the whole program, no interval.
Right, I forgot Takemitsu!! Mea culpa. Another I might mention is Angelo Gilardino who left a large repertoire that most guitarists have yet to explore.
ReplyDeleteFwiw, here encores are very common at local recitals, but much less common at major London recitals. One thing I found strange about seeing a concert in America a few years back, was that the audience gave a wildly enthusiastic standing ovation, but there was neither an encore nor anyone shouting for an encore. I get the impression that this was not an anomaly -- though I could well be mistaken!
ReplyDeleteNo, you are quite right. At our concerts here, where the audience is largely American, the last piece is greeted with loud enthusiastic applause and everyone stands up. But then they grab their coats and leave--no encore. Occasionally there will be one encore.
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