Genaro Pereira in Harare & Bulawayo, Zimbabwe – August 2015
Genaro Pereira plays a sold out recita entitled “Man/AGAINST/Nature” on the 2nd of August 2015 in Harare, Zimbabwe making him the first musician to be allowed perform there after more than three years of cultural isolation. A program that included selections from Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage with its wandering Romantic spirit, plaintive elements and melancholy view of the charming but painful affairs of the heart.
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Genaro Pereira plays John Field H 56
A poetic piece this nocturne is an inspired mood piece in an extended form that contains a dramatic middle section. It has a wondering Romantic spirit with both a plaintive elements and a melancholy view of the charming but painful affairs of the heart.
Man/AGAINST/Nature
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The Ukranian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky, now largely unknown, was a potent force in the shifting isolated Soviet musical landscape of the first half of the last century. This prelude is his first published piano work and demonstrates the composer’s tendency to dissonant and morbidly persistent motivic development typical of the decadent mentality of the Expressionists. However the young composer’s nature is in conflict with the Stalin regime and must shortly be reigned in. It is wonderful to hear in this early work how his original free spirit sings.
Johann Sebastian Bach and his harmonic ordering of the musical universe are completely in line with ideals of the German Enlightenment; the age into which he is born. His many-voiced music is rigorously and, in a way, mathematically structured, reflecting the contemporary thinking: man could exercise his rational thinking over the world. Bach’s genius is so limpid that even the strictness of fugal writing he seems totally natural. How else would his music have touched us for so long if not through something profoundly human and thus natural? The “French Overture” is a showcase for Bach’s mastery of the French-style of composition and a case for cosmopolitan consciousness in a composer who never crossed the borders of a small part of modern Germany. Along with the “Italian Concerto”, another deft rendering of a fashionable foreign idiom, the score for the “French Overture” has dynamic markings (forte or piano) written for the double manual harpsichord - a fantastic instrument of the age.
Nature divides day and night, a contrast that the Irish composer, John Field, exploits prodigiously. Field is the inventor of the Nocturne and a direct influence on Chopin’s famous eponymous works. By nature, Field was a bohemian wanderer and became an alcoholic. As a protégé of Muzio Clementi , Mozart’s “rival”, he decides to stay in Saint Petersburg, Russia, after they tour there together. Here, he creates his “night pieces” or Nocturnes. In the tenth “Nocturne” the perhaps the “dark night of the soul” swells a pining heart. In the eleventh “Nocturne” maybe a floating summer night has varied moments of inspiration that depict the Poet in a dreamy state, his mind wandering with the night. Flashes of concern interrupt the idyll that has longing, yearning and bliss all woven into its fabric.
Beethoven in his turn was never completely happy in his second home, the capital city of Vienna, and regularly “summered” in the countryside. Famously he takes long walks to clear his mind; he is a composer at home in Nature. Works like the “Pastoral Symphony” derive motives directly from sounds and sights of the wilds. Opus 31 contains the famous “Tempest” sonata a title that does not stem from Beethoven but one that speaks of the composer’s “stormy” side perhaps. The first sonata in this opus demonstrates Beethoven’s genius for genuine humour in music where other composers have only managed irony in their works. In Italy this sonata is known as the “Limping” sonata because of the rhythmic peculiarities in the first movement. This rhythm is variously attributed to Beethoven’s depiction of pianists who fail to play their chords with both hands striking the keyboard simultaneously. However it is plausibly also a lighthearted play on audience expectations and characteristic desire for novelty and surprise that inspired this “limping” first movement. This manner is further extended in the second movement that is sometimes remarked to be a caricature of the Viennese-based Italian composers and performers, more popular and successful than Beethoven, and their tendency to over guild the lily in their cadenzas and embellishments. Beethoven takes this mode of comedy and sublimates making profound out of the frivolous. The good-natured Finale takes for its theme a melody that cannot help but remind the listener of Boccherini’s famous minuet. The Internet Movie Database shows 96 film soundtrack credits for this minuet including the TV series “The Good Wife” and “The West Wing” and films like Sir Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers’ “The Ladykillers” (1955). Considered to be one of the finest Rondo’s penned by Beethoven the initial mood is challenged again with a concluding presto.
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When a careless or sensitive person allows the natural environment to influence her directly the effects can be uplifting or conversely, dangerous. A madwoman’s mind is scattered and unfocused like the infinite sea in the distinctive sound-painting of Alkan…The Romantics were greatly influenced by Nature and especially its more tempestuous mood. Alkan’s madwoman is like a small figure swallowed up in a landscape painting, her frail mental state overwhelmed by the relentless forces of Nature.
Emotional subtlety arose in the works of the French author E. de Senancour and others. They noticed that sometimes Man finds that he is in a harsh opposition in his mental with nature’s balmy appearance. In the poem by Galina the subject is conflicted by the loveliness of spring as she herself feels tormented and inconsolable desperation. Rachmaninov in “12 Romances” maintains the introspective spirit of the Romanticism alive in the twentieth century. The seasonality of Nature inspires reflection on the seasons of our dispositions. In a sense, the title “Sorrow in Springtime” seems to hint at the inherent contradictions of Spring. The violent ravishment of bare trees the softest pastels in the falling petals from the blossoms of cherry trees, the abrupt break with the isolation of winter during which the soul searched within as apposed to the exposure and emerging dominance of the body in spring. This sentiment is all but gone by the time summer comes and we are again at harmony with the unequivocally externalised season. Until again in autumn we are unsettled by contradictions.
Sorrow in Springtime G. Galina
How my heart aches!
And yet I would live,
Now that spring with its fragrance is here!
Nay! I have not the strength to seek death
Once for all in the sleepless blue night.
Would that age could come swiftly to me,
Would my brown locks were silver’d with time!
Were I deaf to the laugh of the breeze,
To the nightingale’s passionate voice
As he pours out his heart in a song,
Far away, where the lilac trees bloom!
Would to Heav’n that the silence and dusk
Were not fill’d with such pain and despair!Liszt chooses a motto from F. Schiller as caption, "All for one - one for all” to “The Chapel of William Tell”. This choral orientated work is as much a call to arms as a portrayal of the life of a nationalist hero. Appealing to the emotions and patriotic fervor of the Swiss people in an invocation of their hero, William Tell, this is the very opening of Liszt’s major piano cycle “Years of Pilgrimage”. The swelling patriotic pride that causes one to rise up in the defense of one’s country and to unite with one’s compatriots in a common cause is evoked here. Particularly, a rousing depiction of bugle calls echoing across the land and imploring its listeners to betray its appeal is contrasted with a spiritual hymn in this portrait of the Swiss Nation.
“What do I want? What am I? What do I ask of nature? I feel, I exist only to consume myself in untamable desires, to quench my thirst in the seduction of a fantastic world, to be overwhelmed by its sensuous illusion.”
Obermann Étienne Pivert de Senancour
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage ("Could I embody and unbosom now / That which is most within me,--could I wreak / My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw / Soul--heart--mind--passions--feelings--strong or weak-- / All that I would have sought, and all I seek, / Bear, know, feel--and yet breathe--into one word, / And that one word were Lightning, I would speak; / But as it is, I live and die unheard, / With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword."
Liszt’s centrepiece to his First Year of Pilgrimage takes some inspiration from a novel by Senancour that tapped into the Romantic notions of its day. It depicts an isolated man at a lake as an indolent summer’s night descends. He bemoans his own tormented state as he poses philosophical questions on love in such opposition to the serene beauty proffered by his surroundings. For the Romantics who saw in Nature the inspiration for all that they believed was Truth, the fact that the muse herself could be in opposition must feel like betrayal. Nature, stormy and tempestuous, dramatic and violent, was a clear depiction of the supremacy of emotions for the Romantics. When however, the sun shone and the night was a calm banality they felt betrayed and rallied against such an unmoved natural world by stirring in themselves emotions of great pitch.