MUSIC FOR FLUTE & GUITARTangos, Songs and DancesTaylor • Kain

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MUSIC FOR FLUTE & GUITAR

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA 1921-1992

Histoire du Tango [18’45]1 I. Bordel 1900 3’402 II. Café 1930 6’263 III. Night-club 1960 5’334 IV. Concert d’aujourd’hui (Concert, present-day) 3’06

ROBERT BEASER b. 1954

from Mountain Songs [18’50]5 Barbara Allen 3’166 The House Carpenter 2’157 He’s Gone Away 5’238 Hush You Bye 5’039 Cindy 2’53

DAVID LEISNER b. 1953

Dances in the Madhouse [12’23]0 I. Tango Solitaire 4’31! II. Waltz for the Old Folks 1’58@ III. Ballad for the Lonely 3’45£ IV. Samba! 2’09

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CELSO MACHADO b. 1953

Musiques Populaires Brésiliennes (Brazilian Folk Pieces) [14’52]$ I. Paçoca (Peanut Candy) – Choro 2’42% II. Quebra Queixo (Jawbreaker Candy) – Choro 3’22^ III. Piazza Vittorio (Victor Square) – Choro Maxixe 3’04& IV. Algodão Doce (Fairy Floss) – Samba 1’37* V. Sambossa (Dance Band) – Bossa Nova 1’36( VI. Pé de Moleque (Nut Brittle) – Samba 2’31

ANDRÉ VICTOR CORREA 1888-1948 arr. Timothy Kain and Virginia Taylor) André de Sapato Novo (Andre with New Shoes) 2’13

Total Playing Time 67’03Virginia Taylor fluteTimothy Kain guitar

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The Americas – encompassing north and south, old and new, innocence and sophistication: fourcenturies discovered, and still the ‘New World’. Music of the Americas embraces those samepolarities, with composers from Latin America and the United States bringing together new and oldworld styles. The sounds on this recording are a heady mix of classical formality, folk traditions andthe vibrancy of urban pop. And its themes deal with what are ultimately the most important aspectsof life: singing, dancing, food, love... and new shoes.

Towards the end of his life, Astor Piazzolla – father of the tango nuevo or new tango – composed aminiature history of Argentina’s most popular urban dance, encapsulating its evolving character andeternal appeal. Histoire du Tango (Tale of the Tango) begins in a turn-of-the-century bordello,perhaps on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where its composer was born. Bordel 1900 is cheerful andbustling, its good-natured teasing carried along in a strong two-beat pulse with occasional helpfrom the guitarist-as-drummer. Café 1930 brings the tango into the 1930s and a more respectablemilieu. A rhapsodic introduction for the guitar sets the mood for a slow, heavily melodicinterpretation of the dance. This melancholy tango-romanza seems less for dancing and more forstorytelling of a typically fatalistic variety.

The tango fell out of favour during the 1940s and 50s, only to be revived in the nightclubs of the1960s, when Piazzolla returned from his studies with Nadia Boulanger, having found hiscompositional voice. It was the voice not of a contemporary ‘classical’ composer but, of abandoneon player with a gift for the tango. ‘Tango nuevo’ was born. Night-club 1960 unites thetraditional dance rhythms and colours with the percussive effects of the avant-garde and theimprovisational freedom and rhythmic complexities of jazz. It is structurally more sophisticated too,moving away from the traditional three-part form of the early tangos. Concert d’aujourd’hui is amodern concert tango – literally a tango of ‘today’ – the title as well as its contemporary stylerevealing the influence of Piazzolla’s studies in France. The melody line is more dissonant and lesssingable, the harmony is more audacious, the rhythms more complex. There is a hint of Bartók andStravinsky (who wrote his own tango in L’Histoire du Soldat). But this is surface gesture: beneath,you can feel the tango. ‘My tango,’ said Piazzolla, ‘meets the present.’

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Robert Beaser has nurtured a style that synthesises European traditionand the American vernacular. His popular Mountain Songs – a cycle of eight movements whenperformed in its entirety – acquires its American character from the lyric ballads from the southernmountains of Appalachia. But the songs are not simple transcriptions for flute and guitar; rather, they

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have become the source for original music. The clarity and melodic sweep of these pieces is typical ofBeaser’s lyrical style, which has been compared to that of Samuel Barber, and in 1986 MountainSongs was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Contemporary Composition.

Barbara Allen begins hesitantly, the guitar picking out a fragment of the melody, which is taken up by the flute. A Japanese flavour is given to the dialogue – the flute imitating the sounds of ashakuhachi – revealing the influence of Beaser’s studies with composer Tōru Takemitsu. But barelyhas the familiar tune been heard in its entirety than the music launches into a unique exploration of its melodic shapes and harmonic ideas, weaving together different versions of the melody. The House Carpenter and He’s Gone Away maintain the strongly improvisational spirit of the cycle,in which new melodies, harmonies and structures emerge from the traditional verse-forms.

The selection of Mountain Songs on this recording concludes with two strangers to the AppalachianMountains. Hush You Bye transforms a popular lullaby of the deep South into a whirling fantasiabefore returning to the calm of its opening. Cindy takes its cue from a minstrel fiddle song, andprovides a spirited finale with a cheeky surprise in every verse.

For popular music to be truly ‘of the people’ it must relate to real life. The early-20th-centuryAmerican painter George Bellows felt the same way about his art, despite the prevailing belief thatpainting should ‘uplift and inspire the human spirit through its vision of the ideal.’ Bellows was notafraid to depict the harshness of life or the frailty of human beings in his scenes from everyday life,and one of the most powerful of these is his lithograph Dance in a Madhouse from 1917. Its subtlecomposition highlights four groups of asylum inmates, inspiring guitarist-composer David Leisner tomatch its evocative drama with that of his music.

Leisner’s Dances in the Madhouse was completed at a time when a debilitating hand injury hadforced him to stop playing and turn his attention to composition. Originally for violin and guitar, ithas been widely performed in this version for flute and guitar and in an arrangement for orchestra.

The first movement, Tango Solitaire, depicts a woman dancing stylishly, but alone. Its sensuousmelancholy reminds us that every tango is a self-contained melodrama, and makes us pause towonder: What story does this woman have to tell? The cadenza for unaccompanied flute onlyemphasises the feeling of isolation and self-absorption.

The ‘old folks’ of the waltz are a happy couple who seem perfectly comfortable in their insanity. But there are no such delusions in the music – its predictable oom-pah rhythms are disturbed by

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unexpected, even crazy, bass lines and harmonies that nonetheless sit comfortably with the flute’sbizarre, unfurling melody. The Waltz for the Old Folks comes to an abrupt ending, as if theysuddenly remember where they are.

But not all are dancing in Bellows’ lithograph, and to one side sits a pair of forlorn, despairingwomen – even the rejected of society must have their wallflowers. For them Leisner has written aBallad for the Lonely, in which a drooping and introverted piccolo melody provides a counterpointfor the resignation of the guitar’s gently moving lines. But attention ultimately turns to the middle-aged couple in the foreground, dancing a wild and dizzy Samba!. Percussive effects on the guitarpunctuate the music and draw attention to the relentless syncopations that underpin the busy,leaping melodic lines. The music is borne along by the energy of the samba rhythms until they arediscarded in a throw-away ending.

Virtuoso guitarist and composer Celso Machado was born near São Paulo, Brazil, into a family ofmusicians and a life of constant jam sessions. From the age of seven he was immersed in thepopular music of Brazil, playing in roving street bands, but, like the Argentine Piazzolla, Machadomade a thorough study of classical music and the European tradition. The result is an exciting blendof percussive rhythms, innovative harmonies and popular urban forms.

Musiques Populaires Brésiliennes brings together the samba, choro and bossa nova in anencapsulation of Brazilian popular music not unlike Piazzolla’s history of the tango in Argentina. Thefirst two movements are choros, a genre developed by the ‘musician serenaders’ of Rio de Janeiro inthe 1870s. They had no special music but appropriated the dances and sentimental songs of 19th-century Europe, and later the popular urban dances. Paçoca, named after a traditional Brazilian sweet,has a wistful simplicity and singing quality, but breaks into candid cheerfulness in its middle section.Quebra Queixo (another type of Brazilian confectionery) begins with idiomatic arpeggio patterns forthe guitar supporting a sensuous flute melody. Two contrasting moments disrupt the mood, first whenthe flute soars into its upper register, and later when both instruments launch into a sedate polka.

The choro maxixe is even more closely aligned with the fashionable European dances, the polka andthe mazurka, adding Brazilian flavour with systematic syncopation that displaces the strong beatsnot only in the melodic line but in the accompaniment too. In fact the off-beat flute theme of PiazzaVittorio would be perpetually unsettling if it weren’t for the compelling drive of the underlyingpulse. Like Quebra Queixo, Piazza Vittorio follows the formal structure of the polka, with a recurring

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theme interspersed by contrasting sections, but this buoyant music steals out of the 19th-centuryballroom with a twinkle in its eye.

Algodão Doce (literally ‘cotton candy’ or fairy floss) jumps a century to the samba revival of the1970s. The style is freer and more spontaneous, with a smooth, seductive melody that developsfrom one tiny musical idea. The bossa nova is even more sultry – owing much of its mellow, laid-back character to the fusion of cool jazz and Brazilian rhythms in the 1950s – and Sambossa issuave, romantic and pure ‘cool’. In Pé de Moleque Machado returns to the samba, the carnivaldance genre renowned for its huge percussion bands. The percussion might be gone, but therhythmic subtleties remain.

Brazilian composer André Victor Correa began his career as a music professor. In 1936, he becamethe director of a jazz band, acquiring the familiar name ‘André-the-Saxophonist’.

André de Sapato Novo, another example of the enduringly popular choro, dates from the lastyears of Correa’s life and is probably his best-known piece. Its enigmatic title leaves us wonderingwhether this is a serenade of the choro tradition. Perhaps... surely any girl would fall for a boy withnew shoes. Then again, as guitarist Timothy Kain suggests, maybe they’re dancing shoes, whichwould make this samba-choro a display as well as an invitation. The music bears this out, playingwith the idea of a low held note in the flute that skips up to ever new and more virtuosic variations.And in this transcription for flute and guitar the shoes must, of course, be two-tone. Irresistible!

Yvonne Frindle

Recording Producer & Editor Ralph Lane OAM

Recording Engineer Dennis FoxCover and Booklet Design Imagecorp Pty Ltd

ABC Classics Robert Patterson, Martin Buzacott, Hilary Shrubb, Natalie Shea, Laura Bell.

Recorded 14-16 May 1997 in the Eugene Goossens Hall of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s UltimoCentre, Sydney.

� 1999 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. � 2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Universal Music Group, under exclusive licence. Made in Australia. All rights of the owner of copyright reserved. Any copying, renting, lending, diffusion, public performance or broadcast of this record without the authority of the copyright owner is prohibited.

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