An Album of Brouwer’s Guitar Sonatas (finally!)

Ricardo Gallén on the cover of his new album (courtesy of Naxos of America)

Last month IBS Artist released a two-CD album of the complete (six) guitar sonatas of Cuban-born composer Leo Brouwer. The description on the Amazon.com product page for this item describes Brouwer as “the most important guitar music composer of the modern era;” but this might not occur to anyone trying to learn about him by consulting Wikipedia. His Wikipedia page has a “multiple issues” warning banner at the top; and the List of compositions Web page fails to account for the last two of those six sonatas. Fortunately, the booklet accompanying this recent release compensates for these inadequacies. Brouwer himself contributed an essay about his sonatas; and this is followed by an equally informative essay about Brouwer’s place in the overall repertoire of guitar music written by Ricardo Gallén, the performer of the sonatas on this album.

I am not sure how long I have been aware of Brouwer, but I do remember nodding in recognition when I saw his name in the credits for the 1992 film Like Water for Chocolate. On this site his name appears only in preview articles and only once for an original composition. (The other entries involved arrangements he had composed, particularly of Beatles tunes.) Indeed, it was only this morning, while preparing to write this article, that I discovered that I had a Brouwer CD in my collection. The album Beatlerianas featured two guitarists, Carlos Barbosa-Lima and Larry Del Casale, along with the Havana String Quartet (violinists Hoang Linh Chi and Eugenio Valdés, violist Jorge Hernández, and cellist Deborah Yamak), which had been founded on Brouwer’s initiative in 1980. I wrote about it on Examiner.com in June of 2013, a month after the recording had been released.

The six sonatas were composed between 1990 and 2011. Brouwer is currently 80 years old (born on March 1, 1939); so it is not out of the question that he has at least one more sonata in him. Each of the sonatas on this album was written on a request from the guitarist that first performed the piece. Those performers are, in the order of the composition of the sonatas, Julian Bream, Odair Assad, Costas Cotsiolis, Gallén, Bream (again), and Edin Karamazov (originally written for archlute and arranged for guitar by Gallén).

With the exception of the first sonata, all of them have programmatic subtitles. For the most part those subtitles reflect cultural memories, which are frequently reinforced by the titles of the individual movements. “Ars Combinatoria,” on the other hand, originally referred to a branch of discrete mathematics known as combinatorics, which dates back to techniques developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; and Brouwer’s description of this sonata addresses enough mathematical influences to convince the informed reader that he was not being merely pretentious. When he is not drawing on his own cultural development or knowledge of mathematics, he often turns to other composers for inspiration. For example, there is a blatant nod to Johann Sebastian Bach in the “Ars Combinatoria” sonata, while Alexander Scriabin is explicitly associated with the saraband (second) movement of his first sonata.

Since this album provided my own “first contact” with all of these sonatas and since the original selections on the Beatlerianas album were long forgotten, I have to confess that I am just beginning to find my way through this repertoire. Fortunately, Brouwer lays out the path through each sonata with impeccable clarity, and Gallén brings equal clarity to his traversal of those paths. (This makes a refreshing alternative to another composer who decided to appropriate the “Ars Combinatoria” title, Milton Babbitt!) There are any number of virtuoso demands in each of the sonatas, but Gallén always seems to find the right way to make those passages fit comfortably into his fingerwork.

Nevertheless, given the wealth of opportunities to listen to guitar recitals here in San Francisco, the major impact of this album was to leave me hungry for opportunities to listen to all of these sonatas in performance.