SFP Salons Return with Delightful Mompou Program

1980 photograph of Federico Mompou (photograph of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de la Presidència, from Wikimedia Commons, used with permission)

Yesterday evening the Education Studio of the Diane B. Wilsey Center for Opera saw the return of the San Francisco Performances (SFP) Salon Series. The entire series will consist of four programs curated by Edward Simon, best known in the jazz domain as an improviser, composer, arranger, and band leader but equally well-versed in classical practices. Each program will showcase a different aspect of his approaches to making music, and two of the programs will involve guest artists.

Last night, however, the series began with a one-hour solo recital entirely devoted to a single twentieth-century composer, Federico Mompou. Mompou was born in Barcelona in 1893 and was trained as a classical pianist at the Barcelona Conservatory. However, a recital performance by Gabriel Fauré inspired him to study composition. He travelled to Paris with a letter of recommendation from Enrique Granados but was too shy to meet with Fauré. As a result, his approaches to composition tended for follow his own intuition.

As a result, almost all of his compositions are miniatures. The most notable of his longer works is his set of variations on the seventh (in A major) of Chopin’s Opus 28 preludes, which Daniil Trifonov played in Davies Symphony Hall back in October of 2017. Most of Mompou’s collections were written over the course of his life. The best-known of these are the fourteen Cançons i danses (songs and dances), thirteen of which were written for solo piano, which were composed between 1921 and 1979. Simon played five of these from different periods in Mompou’s life, the first (1921), the second (1923), the sixth (1943), the eighth (1946), and the twelfth (1962).

Similarly, Mompou composed a set of twelve preludes between 1927 and 1968. Simon selected three of these from a much narrower interval of time than that of his Cançons i danses choices. The eighth prelude was composed in 1943; and it was followed by the ninth and tenth, both composed in 1944. Mompou’s largest collection was Música callada (silent music), consisting of four volumes composed, respectively, in 1959, 1962, 1965, and 1967. Simon played all nine of the pieces in the first of these volumes.

This made for a rather generous collection of short pieces. However, there was considerable diversity across that collection, and Simon definitely knew how to give each piece its own sense of individuality. This was definitely music for the intimacy of a salon setting (even if the Education Studio was significantly larger than the previous venue in the Hotel Rex). From a technical point of view, Simon was consistently focused on the music itself, always finding just the right rhetorical stance to capture the uniqueness in the gestural nature of each of Mompou’s works.

When I decided to try to play some of Mompou’s music on my own, one of my colleagues sneered, “Why would you want to play around with his music?” He was clearly one of those academically-minded pianists that felt that anything that lacked sonata form was not worthy of attention and that the only “legitimate” miniaturist was Anton Webern! To be fair, it is certainly true that Mompou wrote melodies that are unabashedly tonal and not subjected to sophisticated development techniques.

Nevertheless, there is a somewhat remote connection to Webern’s teacher that is worth considering. It is that text reference to “air from another planet” that is sung in the final movement of Arnold Schoenberg’s second string quartet. For all their brevity and simplicity, it is the unique air surrounding each of Mompou’s miniatures that makes listening such an absorbing experience, and Simon knew how to fill the Education Studio with that air last night.