BRAVE NEW WORLDS: MUSIC FROM THE AMERICAS
Francesca Anderegg, violin
Matthew McCright, piano
Brave New Worlds: Music from the Americas presents music by Alberto Ginastera, Aaron Copland, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Amy Beach - composers of the 19th and 20th centuries who saw themselves as citizens of the world, traveling internationally and collecting influences to add richness and variety of style to their music. This kaleidoscope of influences yields an inner depth. From the free, soaring cadenza in Ginastera’s Pampeana No. 1, to the abrupt, disjointed representations of despair in Villa-Lobos’ Sonata-Fantasia No. 1, to the vast landscapes of passion and pain in Amy Beach’s Sonata, to the drifting, haunting scales of Copland’s Duo, this music depicts stormy and complex emotional worlds.
The Pampeana No. 1 by Alberto Ginasters is a depiction of the Argentinean grasslands - the pampas. The soaring, rhapsodic, free phrases of the violin cadenza are supported by the piano imitating the strum of open strings on the guitar, before giving way to a fast dance inspired by the gauchos. Copland's Duo is originally for flute and piano, arranged for violin and piano by the composer and edited by Robert Mann (Anderegg's teacher). The perfect intervals and open sound of the introduction are typical of Copland's invocation of American folk music, and are followed by a flowing, lyrical movement. The second movement, marked "Poetic, somewhat mournful," casts a gloomy spell, and the last movement contains constellations of harmonic glitter, brilliant passagework, and rustic charm. Heitor Villa-Lobos' Sonata-Fantasia No. 1, subtitled Désespérance, explores the depths of the human pysche. The character of the music ranges from reflective to abrupt, tangled, rhythmically disjointed: this is despair in all its forms, both the tragic sensibilities of 19th-century Romanticism and a raw, existential howl into the void. Finally, the rarely recorded Violin Sonata Op. 34 by Amy Beach is immense in scope, with a dazzling range of textures, moods, harmonic surprises, Romantic intensity and grandeur. Virtuosic for both instruments, it rivals the well-known sonatas of the Romantic violin canon. It is tightly composed, full of painful harmonies and late-Romantic yearnings, and offers an expansive look at the formal possibilities of the sonata.
Recorded at Kracum Concert Hall at Carleton College. Edited and produced by Matthew Zimmerman and Francesca Anderegg
Released February 14, 2022 on Proper Canary Records. Heard on The New Edge with Ken Fields and MPR’s New Classical Tracks with Julie Amacher.