Naxos Releases Volume 12 of Soler Project

 

Another mountain range gracing the cover of another Soler album (courtesy of Naxos of America)

Once again there has been a lapse of over two years in the Naxos project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler. At that time I had observed that the production team was trying to make up for lost time in the wake of pandemic conditions. However, now that the latest (twelfth) album was released a little over a week ago, I am less certain about the overall timing of the project!

The new release accounts for the next thirteen sonatas in the canon. It begins with the third sonata (and last) in the Opus 8 collection (the first two having appeared in Volume 11), all of which have the same four-movement structure. All of the remaining tracks are single-movement sonatas. If I am to believe the on-line catalog, the total number of sonatas is 120, meaning that there will probably be one more volume to account for the remaining nine sonatas.

Once again, the pianist is a competition-winner. Jaeden Izik-Dzurko was awarded the First Prize in the 67th Maria Canals International Music Competition of Barcelona, held in 2022. The recording was made about two years later under the auspices of the Competition and produced by the soloist. Those (like myself) interested in a full account of Soler’s keyboard sonatas can finally catch a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel!

Maria Canals Winner Plays Soler: Volume 11

courtesy of Naxos of America

Readers may recall that, this past March, Naxos resumed its project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler after a hiatus of almost two years, which was probably due to pandemic conditions. It now appears that Naxos is trying to make up for lost time, because this Friday will see the release of the next volume (the eleventh) in the series. However, if Naxos is getting back on the ball, the same cannot be said for Amazon.com. Once again, those interested in pre-ordering the album will do better to consult the Presto Music Web page, which, as has been the case with previous Naxos releases, is processing pre-orders for both the CD and three formats of digital downloads, all of which include the accompanying booklet. 

Like the preceding tenth volume, this new album consists of three four-movement sonatas, most likely influenced by the First Viennese School. The first sonata on the album completes the Opus 4 set of six sonatas, a grouping that may, itself, have been influenced by First Viennese School composer Joseph Haydn. The remaining two sonatas are the first two from the Opus 8 collection, which departs from the format of Opus 4 by having only three sonatas.

There is probably much that can be said about Soler’s “journey,” which was originally influenced by Domenico Scarlatti, that led him to Haydn as a new influence. Sadly, the booklet notes by Keith Anderson has nothing to say on that matter. Nevertheless, I cannot be overly critical of Anderson, since Frederick Marvin’s contribution to Grove Music Online is also not particularly informative on this matter.

As is the case with all of the albums in this series, the pianist is a winner of the first prize in the Maria Canals International Music Competition of Barcelona. That pianist is the young Latvian Daumants Liepiņš, who won the 65th competition in 2019. He brings a light touch to all three of the sonatas on the album, which may reflect Soler’s shift from some of the more aggressive Hispanic influences to the refinements of Viennese society. Given that Soler composed 120 of these sonatas, those that have been following these Naxos releases since the very first volume are likely to look forward to future releases to see if any further dispositional shifts will arise.

Maria Canals Winner Plays Soler: Volume 10

courtesy of Naxos of America

Almost two years have elapsed since this site reported on the Naxos release of the ninth volume in its current (and second) project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler. This project was organized around piano performances played by prize-winning pianists from the annual Maria Canals International Music Competition in Barcelona. The pianist featured on the ninth volume was Armenian-born Levon Avagyan, who won First Prize (as well as the audience prize and several further special awards) at the 2017 Competition.

Earlier this month Naxos released the tenth volume in this series, which is accounting for all 120 sonatas in numerical order. Readers may recall that the ninth volume marked a major shift in Soler’s approach to composition. While the first 90 sonatas were all single-movement compositions, the last two sonatas on that volume were structured in four movements, the first two in a collection published as Opus 4. Following conventions in both Italy and Vienna, Opus 4 was a collection of six sonatas; and the new recording consists entirely of the next three from this set: Number 3 in F major, Number 4 in G major, and Number 5 in A major. Structurally, all five of these sonatas follow a similar structural pattern for the four movements:

1. Slow
2. Fast
3. Two minuets
4. Fast

It would be fair to say that, from his “vantage point” at the royal palace of King Philip II of Spain, Soler was definitely influenced by the eighteenth-century practices to the east, particularly in Vienna. Nevertheless, he continued to exercise his own “Spanish rhetoric” and his characteristically challenging virtuoso technique. In that context, the pianist on this tenth volume, Evgeny Konnov (born in Uzbekistan), can be credited with “taking up the torch” of the pianists featured on the first nine volumes. Like his predecessors, he had won the first prize at the 64th Maria Canals International Music Competition in Barcelona, which took place in 2018; and his performances of these three sonatas were recorded for Naxos in December of 2019 in the Spanish city of Lloret de Mar.

In other words this new album was ready for release prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, since the ninth volume had been released in April of 2019, Naxos had probably planned the new release to take place about a year later. Unfortunately, after those twelve months had elapsed, the pandemic had put an end to “business as usual,” which probably included the scheduling of the Canals Competition. Hopefully, this new recording is a sign that the overall project is back “on the road again;” and plans are being prepared for selecting the performers for the remaining 25 sonatas in the Soler canon.

PBO to Revisit Two-Harpsichord Recital

Harpsichordists Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya and Richard Egarr behind the keyboard of a grand piano (courtesy of PBO)

About two months ago the Live from Amsterdam program for the 2020/Virtual series hosted by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale (PBO) presented a two-harpsichord recital. Music Director Richard Egarr was joined by virtuoso keyboardist Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya to present a program entitled Bach in the Coffee House – Double Espresso! Johann Sebastian Bach himself provided the “punch line” for the concert, which concluded with his BWV 1061 concerto in C major. (Those expecting orchestral accompaniment should bear in mind that Bach originally wrote the piece for two harpsichords unaccompanied. While there are orchestral parts for this concerto, they may not have been provided by Bach himself.) In all probability, Bach composed this when he was director of the Collegium Musicum, which gave weekly concerts at Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house in Leipzig.

The entire program was planned as a “journey” from the Iberian peninsula to Leipzig. It will begin with the third (in the key of G major) of the six concertos that Antonio Soler composed for two organs, probably for pedagogical purposes.  Egarr and Nepomnyashchaya will then cross the Pyrenees and head for Paris, where they will offer an assortment of some of the works that François Couperin wrote for two keyboards. Couperin’s selections will be followed by a passacaglia by Johann Caspar Kerll, whose music was published in Munich towards the end of the seventeenth century. (Kerll would subsequently move to Vienna.) Bach was an avid student of Kerll’s work, making the transition to BWV 1061 a smooth one.

The video of this performance was recorded in the Lutherse Kerk in Haarlem. There will be a second opportunity to view it this coming Friday, November 13, at 11 a.m. The video will be uploaded to YouTube and will be included among the selections on the PBO YouTube channel.

Maria Canals Winner Plays Soler: Volume 9

A little over a week ago Naxos released the ninth volume in its second project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler. As has already been observed, while the first project consisted entirely of harpsichord performances by Gilbert Rowland, the second has been organized around piano performances played by prize-winning pianists from the annual Maria Canals International Music Competition in Barcelona. The pianist on this latest volume is Armenian-born Levon Avagyan, who won First Prize (as well as the audience prize and several further special awards) at the 2017 Competition:

Levon Avagyan (photograph by Lucija Novak, courtesy of Naxos of America)

The sonatas on this new release cover the numbers between 87 and 92 in the numbers provided by the seven volumes of Samuel Rubio’s publications of Soler’s keyboard works. Once again, the attentive listener finds Soler departing from the single-movement compositions that he had encountered by his colleague at the court of Philip II of Spain, Domenico Scarlatti, in favor of works with multiple movements. Indeed, the last two sonatas on this album both consist of four movements; and Number 92 suggests that Soler was well aware of what Joseph Haydn was doing at the other end of the European continent.

Readers may recall that the eighth volume in this series included a sonata in F-sharp major (Number 79). It is unclear that musicians of Soler’s time gave much thought to the affective characteristics of F-sharp major. In the early nineteenth century, Christian Schubart described those characteristics as follows:

Triumph over difficulty, free sigh of relief uttered when hurdles are surmounted; echo of a soul which has fiercely struggled and finally conquered lies in all uses of this key.

However, this text seems to have more to do with the performer than with the listener. On this new volume F-sharp major surfaces again in the single-movement Number 90; and Schubart’s words could just as easily apply to the ways in which the hands have to cross great distances on the keyboard as they do with dealing with a challenging key signature.

Whatever the composer’s intentions may have been, Avagyan is definitely an agile performer. He also brings good-natured affability to even the most challenging of the passages he performs. He may be experiencing a “sigh of relief” (or two) in his head each time he surmounts one of those challenges; but, on the listener’s side, the prevailing experience is one of delight at the wide diversity of rhetorical stances encountered in Soler’s compositions.

Maria Canals Winner Plays Soler: Volume 8

Two weeks ago today Naxos released the eighth volume in its second project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler. The first project had presented Gilbert Rowland playing all of the sonatas on harpsichord. All of the releases in the second project consist of piano performances, all played by prize-winning pianists from the annual Maria Canals International Music Competition in Barcelona. These pianists are not being presented in “chronological order.” The seventh volume presented the winner of the first prize at the 60th competition, held in 2014. The eighth volume also presents a first prize winner but from an earlier competition, the 58th, held in 2012. That pianist is Soo-Jung Ann:

Soo-Jung Ann (photograph by Dan Hannen, courtesy of Naxos)

Fortunately, the sonatas themselves are being released in numerical order as they were published in seven volumes of transcriptions and scholarly revisions of manuscript sources by Samuel Rubio. (Any reference to a Soler sonata with an “R” number refers to Rubio’s publications, which run to seven volumes.) However, if we are to believe the description on the Amazon.com Web page for this recording, there may be some dispute over how many sonatas make for a “complete” account. That description (which also appears on the back cover of the album, claims that Soler “wrote around 150 keyboard sonatas;” but Rubio’s seven volumes only account for 120. Since I only have the first of Rubio’s volumes, I can only confirm that the numbers of the first twenty sonatas align with the first twenty sonatas to be recorded in this project.

The sonatas on this new release cover the numbers between 75 and 86. All of those sonatas are single-movement compositions with only one exception. Number 79 is a two-movement piece in (of all keys) F-sharp major. My guess is that there is a thesis to be written that addresses rhetorical correlates of Soler’s key selections, but I am not going to be the one to write it!

On the other hand, the fact that Soler chose to write in this key at all leads me to wonder whether Ann’s piano can do justice to interpreting the score. As far as I can tell, she is playing an equal-tempered instrument, since there are only a handful of exceptional cases that require a modern piano to be tuned any other way. Soler, on the other hand, was writing in eighteenth-century Spain, a time when the benefits of equal temperament were acknowledged but not always honored. Thus, Soler may well have tuned his instrument (probably a harpsichord) using perfect fifths and major thirds to define his intervals. Having decided to write in F-sharp major, he then would have written in a way that either avoided or exploited those intervallic “commas” that depart from the five fundamental overtones of the harmonic series.

If Soler took this approach, then it is clear that at least a few of his intervals would sound markedly different. A researcher (again better than I am) may be able to identify from Rubio’s score whether or not Soler avoided intervals in his 79th sonata that he might use frequently when writing in C major. Alternatively, there may have been intervals that he deliberately exploited, perhaps to make sure that anyone listening would not fall asleep. (As we know, Joseph Haydn had his own ways of dealing with such listeners.)

Fortunately, the fact that this new album does not serve as a potentially useful object lesson in musicology is pretty much its only flaw. One can still appreciate the rhetorical breadth of the twelve sonatas on this recent release. For most listeners, that will be enough to make the listening experience a delightfully engaging one.

MUSA’s Candlelight Concert

Yesterday evening at the Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Director of Music Eric Choate presented the latest installment in his Candlelight Concert series. These events are free and therefore depend significantly on donations left when the members of the audience depart. Yesterday’s concert was given by the local early music ensemble MUSA.

The program was MUSA’s fourth installment in a series called Art Inspiring Art, organized around new repertoire for harpsichord and string quartet. The quartet consisted of violinists Tyler Lewis and Laura Rubinstein-Salzedo, violist Sarah Bleile, and cellist Gretchen Claassen, all playing relatively recent instruments but with gut strings. The harpsichordist was Derek Tam, one of the group’s founding members.

On this program the source of artistic inspiration, so to speak, came from Abbie Phillips Walker, the author of several “sandman” books of relatively short stories that parents could read to their children at bedtime. Nick Benavides selected six of these as inspirations for the movements of a suite he entitled The Color Festivals. Walker’s tales tended to have ironic twists and often eccentric characters. Benavides could thus use MUSA’s instrumentation to explore Walker’s character traits through the contrasts between the “contemporary” sonorities of a string quartet and the “dated” connotation of the harpsichord. Also, in recognition of continuo tradition, he afforded the harpsichord several opportunities for improvisation.

Benavides took the time to summarize each of the stories before the performance began. This was useful, since I (at least) had never previously heard of either the author or her stories. However, the details were less important than the overall rhetoric of idiosyncrasy, which set expectations for how the music would reflect on each of the stories. For the most part those expectations were satisfied; and I, for one, hope that this music will be given further performances. Each piece was engagingly clever on the surface, and I suspect that each will be able to hold up to repeated listening by gradually revealing more substantive foundations.

The preceding selections on the program came from the twentieth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. The earlier work was by the Catalan composer Antonio Soler. Soler is best known for his keyboard music, which is currently the subject of an ongoing recording project by Naxos. He is also associated with a fandango, but there is now some question as to whether he was actually the composer of this piece. In 2016 this site discussed a collection of six concertos for two organs, which were probably written for pedagogical purposes and had a fascinating backstory about how they were originally played.

In 1776 Soler published a collection of six quintets scored for strings and obligato keyboard. The strings were the instruments of the string quartet as we now know it. (For the record, Joseph Haydn’s first collection of six string quartets was published in 1764.) There is some indication that the preferred keyboard instrument was an organ. Yesterday MUSA performed the fifth (in D major) of these six quintets with Tam taking the keyboard part on harpsichord.

What was interesting was the extent to which this music tended to sound more like a concerto than the sort of piano quintet encountered during the nineteenth century. Thus, the opening movement begins with an extended passage for the strings during which the keyboard part does nothing other than double the cello line. This is then followed by a duo between the keyboard and the first violin:

original manuscript of the beginning of the keyboard solo (from IMSLP, public domain)

One wonders how Soler would have fared had he been in Vienna, rather than at the court of King Philip V of Spain.

The opening selection was a concertino for harpsichord and string orchestra by the British composer Walter Leigh. Born in 1905, Leigh was best known for “functional” scores he composed for stage and screen. He was particularly adept in the techniques of creating film soundtracks, beyond his skills at simply composing music for those soundtracks. He joined the British Army to fight in the Second World War and was killed in action in 1942 during fighting near Tobruk in Libya.

The concertino was written in 1934 for Elizabeth Poston, who was primarily a pianist. In other words this was not one of the many harpsichord concertos commissioned by Wanda Landowska to promote her “revival” of the instrument, the best known of which were composed by Manuel de Falla (1926) and Francis Poulenc (1928). Listening to Leigh’s score, one gets some sense that he knew about these pieces but still had no trouble finding a way to bring his own voice to his concertino. In the sanctuary of St. Mary the Virgin, the string quartet proved to be just the right size to balance effectively with Tam’s harpsichord work.

Naxos’ Second Project to Record the Keyboard Sonatas of Soler Advances to Volume 7

Today Naxos releases the seventh volume in its second project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler. Regular readers know that I have been following this project in its inception, beginning on Examiner.com and then continuing on this site. The last dispatch came with the release of the sixth volume at the beginning of this past December. While the first project, whose CDs were released between 1996 and 2007, consisted entirely of harpsichord performances by Gilbert Rowland, this new project has been organized around the Maria Canals International Music Competition, held every year in Barcelona. Each CD presents a different pianist that won that competition, meaning that all performances are on piano, rather than harpsichord. The pianist on this new release is Regina Chernychko, winner of the first prize at the 60th competition, held in 2014:

Regina Chernychko (photograph by Oliver Röckle, courtesy of Naxos)

The releases have been strictly following the numbering system of Samuel Rubio. It was from the first of the seven volumes of transcriptions and scholarly revisions by Rubio, published in 1952, that I first became acquainted with Soler’s sonatas. Unless I am mistaken, I acquired that volume while on a business trip to Cambridge (England), although I had become aware of Soler through my piano teacher in Santa Barbara, who had already introduced me to the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.

At the time I wondered how long it would take me to get through the twenty sonatas in that first volume and how difficult it would be for me to get the remaining volumes, all published by the Union Musical Española in Madrid. Over the years, however, I have only managed to progress through the first sixteen sonatas in that volume. Now I no longer have to worry about what to do when I reach the end of the volume, because all of the Rubio versions have now been given digital typesetting by Steve Wiberg and are part of the Werner Icking Music Collection, available for download from IMSLP.

In writing about the sixth volume, I observed that it consisted of only four sonatas, numbered 63 through 66, all in three movements. I noted at the time how this was a departure from Scarlatti, all of whose sonatas consisted of single movements. (However, if we accept the booklet notes for Scott Ross’ recording of all of Scarlatti’s sonatas, there are several cases in which sonatas with consecutive Kirkpatrick numbers could be played convincingly as two-movement sonatas.) What was interesting about the those four Soler sonatas, however, was that each of them ended with a fugue (labeled as “Intento”).

The seventh volume begins with two more of those three-movement sonatas. There is a fair amount of contrapuntal inventiveness in these two sonatas, and the second concludes with another Intento movement in four voices. Soler then went back to single-movement sonatas for the remaining six selections on this album. This leaves the listener with the suggestion that Soler may have been taking stock of how he progressed. That suggestion is not strong enough to leave the listener in suspense over what (s)he will encounter in the eighth volume; but it at least hints that there may be something vaguely autobiographical in Rubio’s numbering of these sonatas.

As to Chernychko’s performance, her accounts are as consistently satisfying as those of her fellow prize-winners. If nothing else this new series, taken as a whole, it likely to leave the attentive listener with a high opinion of the Canals Competition. That is saying something, given how many competitions run the risk of turning out little more than “cookie-cutter accounts” of repertoire that is being played to death in both recital halls and recording studios!

Naxos’ Second Project to Record the Keyboard Sonatas of Soler Advances to Volume 6

At the beginning of this month, Naxos released the sixth volume in its second project to record all of the keyboard sonatas of Antonio Soler. Recordings for the first project were all made by harpsichordist Gilbert Rowland and were released between 1996 and 2007. This time around, each volume, consisting of a single CD, involves a different pianist, all of whom were winners of the Maria Canals International Music Competition, held every year in Barcelona. The pianist on the sixth volume is Stanislav Khristenko, who took first prize at the 59th competition, held in 2013.

This album contains only four sonatas, numbered 63 through 66, following the numbering system of Samuel Rubio, whose edition of the Soler sonatas ran to seven volumes published between 1952 and 1972. Those who have been following these Naxos releases (or are acquainted with Rubio’s publications) probably know that Number 60 in C major (included in the fifth volume of the series) was Soler’s first sonata to consist of more than one movement. This was a major departure from the structural approach taken by Soler’s contemporary, Domenico Scarlatti, who composed almost all single-movement sonatas in binary form (with the exception of a few fugues). Number 60 has only two movements, coupling a leisurely Andantino with a brief Allegro vivo. This is followed by two four-movement sonatas, both of which include minuet movements.

All four sonatas on the new volume consist of three movements, and they all follow roughly the same structural pattern. The middle movement is the Allegro, and it is introduced by a slower movement. Most interesting, however, is that the final movement of each of these sonatas is a fugue. Thus, any “comfortable” expectations that had been established over the course of the first four volumes have now been eliminated. According to the booklet notes by Keith Anderson, these four sonatas are the first of a set of six all of which date from 1777. Scarlatti had died in Madrid in 1757; so it would appear that Soler had been gradually working away from the Baroque conventions that were already in decline when Scarlatti died, seeking out, instead, his own approach to the Classical conventions that were emerging.

That makes this new album a fascinating release, particularly for those who thought they knew all about Soler on the basis of his single-movement sonatas. If the younger Soler tended to distinguish himself with flamboyant finger-busting virtuosity, this new release presents us with an older Soler (two years short of his 50th birthday) confident enough to explore new approaches to what a sonata could be. That adventurous nature is all the more interesting when we consider the possibility that Soler’s knowledge of what was happening in the rest of Europe halfway through the eighteenth century was probably relatively limited, if he had any such knowledge at all. (What would he have done had he encountered the work of the teenaged Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose travels never took him across the Pyrenees into the Iberian Peninsula?)

Delos Releases a New Recording of Antonio Soler’s Concertos

A little over two weeks ago, Delos Productions released a new CD of “Six Concerti for Two Keyboards” by Antonio Soler. The quote marks are there because the title needs clarification. In the publications of Soler’s works released by the Union Musical Española, the performing editions of these concertos were prepared by Padre Samuel Rubio under the title (following the typography on one of the Union’s publications) “SEIS CONCIERTOS PARA DOS ORGANOS o para dos instrumentos de tecla.” This suggests that Soler conceived of the concertos for two organs but probably realized that, since finding two organs in the same location could be problematic, any pair of independent keyboards would suffice.

The primary selection, however, seems to have been based on pedagogical reasons. Soler had been appointed harpsichord tutor to Gabriel, son of Charles, the fifth son of King Philip V of Spain. Charles would become King Charles III, making Gabriel the Infante Gabriel, who died of smallpox in 1788. For his musical studies an organ was built with two keyboards on opposite sides of a cabinet of pipes; and, as Newsome observes, this is the instrument on which the concertos were first played by Soler and Gabriel.

Soler is probably best known for his 120 keyboard sonatas. Like those of his predecessor, Domenico Scarlatti, these are single-movement compositions. It is clear from the treatise he published on modulation that Soler was aware of Scarlatti and admired him greatly. Scarlatti spent the last quarter century of his life at the Spanish court; but, as the booklet notes by Joseph Newsome observe, there is much debate over whether Soler actually met him. Naxos is currently on its second round of recording all of Soler’s sonatas; and, as of the beginning of this year, they had released five volumes that account for about half of them.

As performed by Philippe LeRoy and Jory Vinikour, the six concertos fit comfortably on a single CD lasting about 75 minutes. All but one of them have only two movements, and all of them conclude with a minuet. All but the last begin with a slow tempo. The first movement of the final concerto has an opening movement that alternates between fast and slow tempos, leading one to wonder if Soler may have just encountered some of the scores of Arcangelo Corelli and realized that there was another Italian he admired as much as Scarlatti! (Newsome never mentions Corelli in his notes.)

Many of Soler’s keyboard sonatas are best known for their sometimes outlandish virtuosic demands. Several are likely to leave the performer wishing that (s)he had at least one extra hand. (That last sentence was written from personal experience with the tenth sonata in B minor!) On the basis of listening alone, it is hard to tell just how much of that virtuosity is imposed on two performers at separate keyboards. If the concertos were composed for pedagogical purposes, then the emphasis may have been on basic keyboard dexterity. However, Gabriel was apparently an excellent pupil; so Soler may have written the concertos to amuse the two of them with call-and-response exchanges.

LeRoy and Vinikour present the concertos with admirable clarity, meaning that the listener has no trouble following either the thematic material of its development. However, visual input from physical presence would probably be necessary for the listener to have a clear sense of when which performers are playing what. As a result listening alone is insufficient to work out any give-and-take rhetorical gestures. Thus, the best that this recording can offer is an appreciation for the overall effect; but that is an appreciation that would definitely benefit any listener fortunate enough to encounter one of these concertos in performance.