Pianist Mariel Mayz on the cover of her new album (courtesy of Jazz Promo Services)
About four weeks ago, ZOHO Music released a new album of music by Leo Brouwer. The name of this Cuban composer is best known among guitarists. Given the many opportunities to listen to guitar recitals here in San Francisco, I have had a variety of opportunities to get to know his music. Most recently, I wrote about a performance of “La Gran Sarabanda,” which is basically an elaborate fantasia based on the Sarabande movement from Handel’s HWV 437 keyboard suite in D minor, at a recital presented by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. Ironically, I had previously encountered this selection his past June, when Naxos Records released a solo guitar recital by Bokyung Byun as part of its Laureate Series of albums.
This new album, however, introduced me to a side of Brouwer’s repertoire that had previously been unknown to me. Entitled Cuban Sketches for Piano, it surveys a generous share of solo piano compositions, almost all of which are strikingly brief. Between 1961 and 2007, Brouwer composed ten of these pieces, giving each of them the title “Boceto” (sketch). Each is dedicated to a Cuban visual artist. They are followed by three compositions completed in 2021 and collected under the title New Sketches for Piano. These were composed for pianist Mariel Mayz; and, since they are numbered 3, 4, and 5, we have good reason to assume that this follow-up collection is a work-in-progress.
Mayz performs all thirteen pieces on this new album. She also includes a longer composition, her own set of variations on a theme that Brouwer composed for the soundtrack of Un dia de noviembre, a film made and directed by Humberto Solás. The album concludes with “An Idea (Passacaglia for Eli),” which was composed for the 75th birthday of Canadian guitarist Eli Kassner. Mayz performs her own arrangement of this music for solo piano.
Brevity was clearly a significant factor in Brouwer’s comfort zone. A collection of compositions for two guitars was given the title Micropiezas. The movements of his guitar sonatas are developed at somewhat further length, but all of them are less than ten minutes in duration. Nevertheless, each of these “musical gestures” has its own strategy for drawing the listener’s attention. Mayz clearly appreciates Brouwer’s rhetorical devices behind those gestures, and the album as a whole has more than enough to satisfy the attentive listener.
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