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Roberto Gerhard - Piano Concerto

Roberto Gerhard (1896 - 1970) - Piano Concerto (1951) I. Tiento. Allegro [0:00] II. Diferencias. Adagio [7:24] III. Folia. Molto mosso [18:49] Geoffrey Tozer, piano BBC Symphony Orchestra, Matthias Bamert (1997) Roberto Gerhard's Piano Concerto is a work for piano and string orchestra in three movements. Typical performances last around 25 minutes. "The Piano Concerto is arguably Gerhard's finest concert work before the late music. It is pure 'duende', whose closest English equivalent is daemon. This is the first work in which Gerhard employs his own personal serial technique. Each movement uses a linear ground related to the two hexachords of Gerhard's row material. The aural impression, however, has little relationship to Schoenberg's serial compositions. It is closer to the mature Bartok, Szymanowski, and to the works of the French polytonalists - for example Honneger's Symphonie liturgique. The Concerto's opening plunges straight into a surrealist soundscape. All is headlong movement, as if the piano is fleeing from some powerful force represented by the string orchestra. The keyboard concertos of Bach and the solo sonatas of Scarlatti and Soler have been absorbed into Gerhard's own twentieth-century language. The composer entitles each movement with a style-form used by Spanish composers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Here it is the Tiento, an improvisation controlled by a number of formal devices the composer-performer knew by heart. Gerhard said these forms are spiritual antecedents and not direct models. During the course of the movement he adds markedly different ideas, all related to his serially derived material. Eventually the music slows down and the tension eases in a passage for strings. Inevitably the on-rushing motion returns, but only to be cut off in a cul-de-sac. In the second movement, 'Diferencias', the composer has in mind the fantasia variations or diferencias by composers such as Antonio de Cabezon. A further source for the opening is the guitar practice of acciaccatura, sounding a given note of a chord and its appoggiatura simultaneously. This slow, ruminating cadenza-like music sets the mood of profound brooding which characterizes the entire movement. After a four-bar transition, still reminiscent of guitar music, the lower strings enter with the principal theme, one of the most remarkable the composer ever wrote. Nowhere in his output does his concept of 'transubstantiation' bear such rich fruit. Here the process is practiced on the Catalan religious song 'Goig del roser'. Taking his cue from the descending minor second present in the song's melodic contour, he creates a melody which seamlessly interweaves the opening notes of the Dies Irae. Gerhard combines the opening cadenza and this theme into a complex double variation that ends in a cadence which, in its resemblance to Roman polyphony, may be a tribute to Victoria. The piano then embarks on a passage of extended trills which forms the beginning of two further variations where there are near quotes from the twentieth-century masterpiece which most seemed to haunt Gerhard, Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Gradually the music fragments and the tension dissipates. Gerhard's use of the term 'Folia' for the last movement carries an association of meanings. It refers to a chord sequence with a corresponding melodic pattern which originated in Spain in the late Middle Ages. 'Folia' in Portuguese means a 'fools dance' but in Catalan it is a euphemism for the sexual climax. Gerhard first used this term ironically in the third movement of his cantata L'Alta naixença del rei En Jaume (1932), which also refers to the 'Goig del roser'. Rather mysteriously, in his own programme note to the concerto, he speaks of the menacing references to the 'Folia', which, as the listener will recognize, is also the first three notes of God Save the King. For the republican exile, writing in the Festival of Britain year, these ponderous allusions within a fleeting light-footed moto perpetuo appear deeply subversive. Such musical satire would have been impossible in his own country, still in the grip of fascism." (source: Chandos) Original audio:    • Roberto Gerhard: Concerto per pianoforte e...