Valerio Celentano - Debussy: A Guitar Perspective (Transcriptions, Dedications, Inspirations) (2022) [Digital Download 24/96]

Debussy’s “Iberism” was made to glide, in the fashion of a synecdoche, towards a clear and declared “Guitarism”. However, the Frenchman’s explicit citations of and allusions to the guitar would suffice to support such theses. If Segovia’s most cherished vision saw the guitar as a “miniature orchestra”, Debussy overturned it. In some cases, he treated the orchestra itself as a “great guitar”. In Matin d’un jour de fête, from Ibéria, he makes his request of imitation explicit, through the indication of “quasi chitarra” asking the violinists to hold the instrument under their arms. The same premise applies to the articulation and interpretation of the piano prelude La sérénade interrompue.

Debussy must have certainly had a clear idea of the guitar’s expressive and timbral possibilities. In Paris, he had had the possibility of listening to the Andalusian guitarists who accompanied the cante jondo, and also to befriend the great Catalan guitarist Miguel Llobet, of whom he said he was “his first admirer and great friend”. His enthusiastic definition of the guitar as a “humanised harpsichord” is the direct consequence of a recital by Llobet himself. However, Llobet has frequently been criticised for his short-sightedness, since he did not nourish the French composer’s curiosity for the six-stringed instrument. The then-emerging, and more resourceful Andrès Segovia would have certainly shown a different attitude. Already in 1913, during a recital at the Madrid Atheneum, he inserted a transcription of his own after Debussy’s Arabesque no. 2 – an elaboration which, alas, was then lost. However, in 1920 there will be a fundamental contribution by Manuel De Falla with his Homenaje. Two years after the untimely death of his French friend and colleague, he would draw from Debussy’s writing, and mainly from Soirée dans Grenade, the compositional elements which are closest to the guitar and to the cante jondo. He would resume them in a dirge, permeated with pride and sobriety at the same time. By celebrating the union which, until then, had only been imagined, he would polarize the composers’ attention, and that of classical music in general, on the guitar. He claimed for this instrument a worthiness for a modern and developed language, capable also to welcome the Frenchman’s innovations. It is not by chance that, in the subsequent seven years, other compositions would be created. Starting from similar presuppositions, they would reach results very different from each other.

The first guitar work by composer, poet and painter George Migot (Paris, February 27th, 1891; Levallois-Perret, January 5th, 1976) dates from 1924. It is dedicated to Segovia, “qui en fut une seule fois l’interprète”, as is written on the manuscript’s first page. Pour un hommage à Claude Debussy is proposed here in a personal adaptation by myself. It derives from the original (which is rather tortured by deletions, afterthoughts, and alternatives) some timbral and harmonic solutions, and some instrumental effects which certainly had not been met with favour by the nature and aesthetic taste of the guitarist from Linares. The three movements composing it are characterized by juxtapositions of “gestures” rather than by quotations from the Frenchman’s music. Over their development, repetition is favoured: either identical, or in different registers.

Temporal suspensions provided by an abundant use of rests and fermatas contribute to the rarefaction of the evocation of Debussy; it slowly fades into an aethereal Postlude.

Due to their evident aesthetical and linguistic proximity, the English composer Cyril Scott (September 27th, 1879 – December 31st, 1970) was known to Debussy himself. Besides being an expert in occultism, he was, like Migot, also a painter, writer, and poet. His Sonatina for guitar (1927) did not meet with the enthusiasm of its dedicatee, Segovia, who performed just the first of its three movements and later let it fall into oblivion. The dreamy atmosphere of the first movement – which, not by chance, was called Rêverie by the Spaniard – reintroduces the use of open strings. They produce the superimposition of fourths which had been already cherished by the French composer and by De Falla in his Homenaje. His request for the production of harmonics (not always realizable) is punctuated by harmonizations of the six-tone scale in different keys, by short and sinuous melodies making abundant use of chromaticism; and this is even more evident in the ironic and lively second movement. The third recalls the Andalusia evoked by De Falla, in its thick chordal rhythmic sections, broken by arpeggiated ninth-chords, closer to the Hommage à Rameau.

Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Douze Etudes of 1928 were not conceived as an explicit homage to the French composer. Still, they recall, already in the work’s structure and in their technical-didactic purpose, the precedents by Debussy. The influence of Debussy in the education of post-Imperial Brazil musicians is known. It is evident in the writing style of young Villa Lobos, who, once come to Paris, attempted to be ranked among the rising composers, gaining for himself the name – not always a welcome one – of the Brazilian Debussy. His piano collection A prole do bebê, notwithstanding its refreshing originality, is ripe with citations and elements which can be led back to the Frenchman’s Préludes. The same can be said of the Impressionistic sound of his Sextuor mystique (1917), where the guitar is also employed. Still, a delicate and scantily discussed subject regards the presence of Debussyan elements in his guitar etudes, whose only highlighted element is frequently their allusion to the primeval Amazonian sounds. The Fourth Etude, des accords répétés (Bonustrack), is here performed. Here Villa Lobos has the great merit of having been the first to translate, into the guitar’s “miniature orchestra”, the effects of tremolo and “pulsating melody” which are typical for so-called Impressionist orchestration (as in La Mer and some sections of Nocturnes). The Fifth Etude begins with a technique already employed in Moreninha, i.e. a wavering ostinato of free or arpeggiated thirds on the six-tone scale, recalling the structure and sound of Debussy’s Prelude Cloches à travers les feuilles. The acciaccaturas of the mythical songs of Debussy’s Syrènes, once recontextualised, are transfigured here into a magical flute-like sounds of deep Amazonas.

The Suite compostelana by Federico Mompou (Barcelona, April 16th, 1893 – Barcelona, June 30th, 1987) is certainly a mature work by the Catalan composer. Already in his youth he felt the powerful influence of the French musical Impressionism. His language is made of miniatures, of brief and synthetic melodies, together with a knowledgeable use of guitar polyphony. This language can evoke images as few others: the pictorial impression of the light rain surrounding Santiago de Compostela (Preludio), the allusion to ancient sounds bound to the holiness of the place (Coral), the simplicity and expressive power of folk melody (Cuna, Canción), the dark, fantastic, dramatic and resigned climate of post-War Europe (Recitativo), and the popular festiveness of the gaitas gallegas (Muñeira).

The placid Nocturno- Homenaje a Claudio Debussy is inspired by the more popular Debussy, the one of Clair de Lune and Rêverie. It was written by Argentinian composer and pedagogue Ángel E. Lasala (Buenos Aires, May 9th, 19141 – Buenos Aires, May 1st, 2000), who dedicated several solo, and more importantly, chamber music works to the six-stringed instrument. The suggestions blossoming from the imaginary juxtaposition between Debussy and the guitar did not fade with time. Rather, probably, in the recent, widespread quest for the guitar’s original sound (a more intimate and expressive one, going hand in hand with the recovery of period luthiery), these suggestions seem to take new vigour, especially in the works by German guitarist and musicologist Tilman Hoppstock (1961-). Under the penname of Allan Willocks, employed along with his own name, he dedicates part of his compositional works for the guitar to the French and English Impressionist style (12 Studies, 12 Miniature Preludes, 12 Impressionistic Sketches). In the Variations on a Theme of Debussy recorded here, throughout the ten variations, he abundantly probes (in the timbral, harmonic, and technical sense) one of the most mysterious and atemporal among the Frenchman’s themes, i.e. Des pas sur la neige.

It is to be said that Debussy’s original sonorities, so desired by the world of guitar (with the exception of the early, above-mentioned unicum by Segovia in 1913) would be late in arriving, under the form of transcriptions, within the guitar repertoire. We will have to wait for great guitarist Mario Parodi, born in Istanbul from Italian parents in 1917, and who then moved to Argentina where he lived and worked up to his death in 1970. He was doubtlessly obscured by Segovia’s star, but he certainly was an excellent self-taught guitarist, and most importantly, a very skilled transcriber (he was perhaps the first to propose D. Scarlatti’s works on the guitar). His elaborations of the most important works in the classical repertoire, mainly for the piano, mirror, with another impetus and with great clarity in the musical ideas, Tarrega’s adaptations, by now abandoned in favour of an original repertoire. Their commercial and qualitative potential, however, was soon resumed by the Ricordi Americana, which successfully inserted them within their catalogue around the mid-twentieth century.

His best-known Debussy transcriptions, recorded here, demonstrate how free he was from academic preconceptions and conditionings, both as concerns the choice of repertoire and the original, not always simple, technical solutions he adopted.

Side by side with them is one of the two Debussy Preludes transcribed and issued by the other great representative of post-1950 guitar, i.e. Julian Bream (Battersea, July 15th, 1933 – Donhead St. Andrew, August 14th, 2020). His elaborations, and in particular the one proposed here, stand out for their technical fluidity and their amplification of expressive possibilities through an extremized use of guitar colours.

Finally, I propose my own elaboration of the Hommage à Rameau. It is a piece with great depth and compositional maturity. Not by chance, it was chosen by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli as a very rare encore in order to pay homage to his friend, conductor Sergiu Celibidache. The version for the guitar – perhaps the first to have been created, until now – does not lose anything in terms by expressive intensity. Moreover it reveals, in my humble opinion, what had already been absorbed, of Debussy’s vocabulary, in the guitar repertoire, during the past century.

Tracklist:
1. Deux Arabesques, L. 66: No. 1 in E Major, Andantino con moto (Arrangement by Mario Parodi) (05:17)
2. Préludes, Premier Livre, L. 117: No. 8, La fille aux cheveux de lin (Arrangement by Julian Bream) (03:16)
3. Images (Prèmiere Série), L. 110: No. 2, Hommage à Rameau (Arrangement by Valerio Celentano) (06:14)
4. Homenaje pour le tombeau de Debussy (03:15)
5. Pour un hommage à Claude Debussy: I. Prelude (New Version from the Original Manuscript by Valerio Celentano) (04:55)
6. Pour un hommage à Claude Debussy: II. Pastorale (New Version from the Original Manuscript by Valerio Celentano) (03:53)
7. Pour un hommage à Claude Debussy: III. Postlude (New Version from the Original Manuscript by Valerio Celentano) (02:54)
8. 12 Estudos, W235: No. 5, Andantino (03:00)
9. Sonatina for Guitar: I. Sonatine (06:30)
10. Sonatina for Guitar: II. Allegretto pensoso (01:49)
11. Sonatina for Guitar: III. Finale (02:30)
12. Suite Compostelana: I. Preludio (03:32)
13. Suite Compostelana: II. Coral (02:29)
14. Suite Compostelana: III. Cuna (03:03)
15. Suite Compostelana: IV. Recitativo (02:50)
16. Suite Compostelana: V. Canciòn (02:57)
17. Suite Compostelana: VI. Muñeira (03:10)
18. Nocturno (Homenaje a Claudio Debussy) (03:38)
19. Variations on a theme of Debussy: I. Introduction & Thema (01:39)
20. Variations on a theme of Debussy: II. Var. I-II (01:22)
21. Variations on a theme of Debussy: III. Var. III - IV - V (02:00)
22. Variations on a theme of Debussy: IV. Var. VI (01:43)
23. Variations on a theme of Debussy: V. Var. VII – VIII (01:45)
24. Variations on a theme of Debussy: VI. Var. IX (01:52)
25. Variations on a theme of Debussy: VII. Var. X (03:22)
26. Suite Bergamasque, L. 75: III. Clair de lune (Arrangement by Mario Parodi) (06:11)
27. 12 Estudos, W235: No. 4, Un peu modéré - acordes repetidos (04:03)


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