Gabriela Montero: Notes on the Program
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
[…]
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
(extract from “La Guitarra” [The Guitar] by Federico Garcia Lorca. Translated by Cola Franzen)
Today, we’re all tourists of the stunning expanse of western Europe collectively known as the Iberian Peninsula. Made up of Spain, continental Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar and a sliver of France, this vast area includes dry plateaus and steep mountain ranges, deep river valleys and rolling shores. It’s also the home of a tapestry of peoples, sharing a history defined by intense cultural blending, global colonial empires and hard-fought modern struggles for democracy. With her brilliantly compiled Iberian-inspired program, Gabriela Montera takes us on a journey – not just geographical and historical, but also psychological and emotional.
As the Lorca quote above suggests, we’re in for a visceral and moving blend of immediate passion and distant longing. Our sonic travels will take us from the courts of Madrid and Lisbon to the cathedrals and monasteries of Catalonia and Castile. We’ll visit the working-class neighborhoods in Seville and get a glimpse into the birthplace of flamenco. We’ll also see how the tourist vision of “postcard Iberia” differs from the inner world of those born into this reality. We’ll see how the keyboard, from baroque sonata to romantic rhapsody, develops as a vehicle for cultural and personal expression and how the distinct aesthetic of a “Spanish” sound exists in the constant tension between blinding external light – and the quiet, deeply sacred inner landscape.
Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757)
Sonata in C-sharp Minor, K. 247
Domenico Scarlatti spent most of his adult life away from his native Italy, moving to Lisbon in his mid-thirties to take up the position as musical director for King John V of Portugal. He would eventually follow his employer to Spain and the effect of this complete immersion in Iberian culture and court life would leave an indelible mark on Scarlatti’s keyboard style.
When listening to Gabriela’s opening sonata, try to focus on the right hand melody. Can you hear it move in narrow, winding steps, almost like a vocal lament? Although we have historical evidence that this piece was composed in Scarlatti’s mature years, when he was living in Madrid, I cannot help but hear what I call “Portuguese fado energy” in there. Scarlatti’s use of rapid ornamentation and a plucking-style accompaniment under a singing melody has unmistakable traditionally Portuguese roots, too, stemming from the shared Iberian historical link to Moorish and Arabic influence.
Antonio Soler(1729–1783)
Sonata in C-sharp Minor, R.21
We’re still in the same key, but that’s where the similarities end. Gone is the melancholy lamentation of the Scarlatti sonata, making room for a much more visceral, kinetic experience. Born in Catalonia, the gifted and virtuosic keyboard player Antonio Soler was admitted to the monastery of San Lorenzo El Escorial (approximately 28 miles northwest of Madrid) in 1752. As luck would have it, El Escorial was also where the Spanish royal family and their entire musical entourage would migrate to for one month every autumn, leading to the 23-year-old would-be monk regularly crossing paths with Scarlatti!
Scarlatti’s influence on Soler’s compositional approach is clearly audible. Following what we could almost call a “Scarlatti blueprint”, Soler’s sonata unfolds in a single movement, starting in the home key of C-sharp minor, migrating to the relative major and coming home to the original. Just like Scarlatti, Soler turns the whole keyboard into his playground, using frequent hand crossings and athletic leaps to great dramatic effect.
By the time this sonata was composed, around 1760, Soler had already taken his monastic vows and was living the rigid, ordered life of a Hieronymite monk. Still, listening to the almost aggressive percussive rhythms in the bass and the skyrocketing treble octaves in this work, one wonders about Padre Soler sitting at his keyboard, processing and perhaps emulating the fiery forbidden sounds from the world outside!
Sonata in G Major, R. 45
Even sunnier and more structurally indicative of Scarlatti’s direct or indirect influence on Soler is the joyful Sonata in G Major. Again, we have neat structural balance, countered with explosive leaps in the left hand and flourishes and trills in the right, combining to communicate great exuberance and playfulness. As an insider to the Spanish court (it’s fascinating to read about the Hieronymites, who were, essentially, the “court chaplains” in Spain), Soler wasn’t living in complete isolation, but was tasked with giving music lessons to King Carlos III’s son, Don Gabriel. This delightful sonata most likely both served as an advanced teaching tool meant to build the prince’s rhythmic control and precision, and as a bouncy musical diversion.
Domenico Scarlatti
Sonata in G Major, K. 427
Going right back to the “grand master”, Scarlatti, Gabriela’s program beautifully illustrates the stark difference between the Germanic approach to form, and the Iberian. Remember: Bach and Scarlatti were born in the exact same year! Yet, they cannot possibly sound more different. Whereas Bach’s vast and genius keyboard repertory take a decidedly intellectual approach to playing, Scarlatti’s sonatas have a physicality and a sensory drive to them that, to my ear, at least, speaks from a Latin soul. Scarlatti’s breathless K. 427 (it has one of the most famous tempo markings in all of Baroque music: Presto, quanto sia possibile, meaning “as fast as possible”) sounds completely free and liberated, hands flying and leaping as if breaking out in a spontaneous dance. While Bach looks at the heavens, Scarlatti steps unashamedly into the world.
Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849)
Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 39
At first glance, there’s nothing connecting the Polish-French Chopin or the Italian Scherzo (meaning “joke”) to Iberia … or is there? Gabriela Montero pulls off a brilliant piece of historical and musical counterpoint by putting Chopin at the center of her recital. The piece connects directly to everything before and after it – from the shared key of C-sharp minor (Scarlatti and Soler) to the dual lenses of outward expression and inward reflection (more about this as we move towards Mompou and Alicia De Larrocha). It was also composed on Spanish soil, in that sense giving us one of the best examples of “seeing Spain from the outside in” – although the view is not positive!
Op. 39 was conceived during Chopin’s famously catastrophic “winter in Mallorca” (1838–1839) – three months and three days that couldn’t be further removed from the the sunny, blossoms-and-blue-skies picture I sketched in the introduction. Chopin’s Mallorca was cold, wet, miserable and lonely. He fell violently ill. He had terrifying hallucinations and coughed up blood. Still, he found solace at his piano.
What we hear throughout this not-at-all-jokey scherzo, from the heavy opening chords to the final, breathless coda, is a complete subversion of form and the ultimate reckoning with what must have felt like a cosmic joke. Here is the consumptive patient hoping for sunshine, but getting nothing but prolonged suffering! Unlike a Haydn or Beethoven scherzo, which would be light and playful, we’re pulled into a Gothic tempest, crashing over us like a steady stream of bad news. And yet: The piece also brings us heavenly, hymn-like melodies and an eventual resolution in C-sharp major – insistence on peace, light and redemption to be found amidst the turmoil. To me, this is nothing but a genuis excercize in taking a “polite” and carefully structured northern European form and allowing it to exist loudly, fully and with Latin soul.
Enrique Granados (1867–1916)
8 Valses Poéticos
It’s worth noting that, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a perception took hold in Iberia that “superior” music had to be Italian or French. This led to a dramatic decline in “authentically Spanish sounding” music created by local composers. Enter another monk-scholar, Felipe Pedrell, today considered the father of modern Spanish musicology, who in 1891 declared: “Our classical music is dead because we are copying Italy and France. We must look inward at our own roots.” He launched a crusade to rescue the Iberian soul, collecting, editing and publishing lost masterpieces, transcribing folk songs and recording the dance rhythms of the streets. He was also the teacher and mentor to two of the most prominent names on this program: Enrique Granados and Isaac Albéniz!
Granados took Pedrell’s advice in a most idiosyncratic way, aiming to revive the aristocratic elegance and intimacy of the courtly poetry of Spain’s past. He takes the waltz – the ultimate elite symbol of central European high-society ballrooms – and quietly injects it with unmistakably Iberian melancholy and saudade. As the eight miniature waltzes of this piece begin to cycle through, they sound deceptively Viennese or Parisian at first. But listen closely to the inner harmonies: Beneath the polite waltz rhythm, Granados weaves the sudden, bittersweet modal shifts and “sigh” intervals that he inherited from Scarlatti and Soler. It is a European waltz, but it is dreaming of Spain.
Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909)
“Triana” from Iberia, Book II
At the very opposite end of the “back-to-our-Spanish-roots”-spectrum sits Albéniz, whose distillation of the sounds of the Spanish streets is the pinnacle of Pedrell’s vision. “Triana” is not just a random Spanish name – it’s a legendary working-class neighborhood in Seville, for centuries the enclave of gypsies, sailors, potters and bullfighters. Historically, it became one of the raw incubators for flamenco singing, dancing, and guitar playing. Once you hear the dense layering of rhythms, the swaggering syncopation, the chromatic wanderings of the melody and the pulsating ¾ energy, you cannot help but marvel at how Albéniz turns the piano into a multi-voiced folk guitar. Accent strikes in the lower-middle register sound like stomping feet, the relentless clicking rhythm propels the music forward like the snap of castanets. We are not just listening “to” Iberia, we are physically in it!
INTERMISSION
Isaac Albéniz
“Sevilla” from Suite española, Op. 47
For Chopin, Spain was a threatening, claustrophobic existential prison. For Albéniz, it was his intoxicating ancestral home. Even though he wrote “Sevilla” while traveling and living abroad (the history of the Suite española, Op. 47 is a fascinating puzzle that took decades to piece together), his nostalgia wasn’t painful or terrifying – it was a celebratory, vivid act of cultural reclamation. Premièred by Albéniz himself in January 1886, “Sevilla” turns the piano into an instrument of absolute national pride. Instead of letting European dance form dictate the narrative, “Sevilla” surrenders its identity to Andalusia. Listen for the swaggering outer sections of the piece (bright dance rhythms in the right hand, mimicking the rapid plucking of a guitar and the snapping of fingers of street dancers), followed by the “copla” – the traditional vocal interlude. A slow, haunting melody enters in the middle register, twisting and turning around only a few notes. The final flourish sounds like a celebration of physical movement – a dancer stomping his heels one final time, or a guitarist triumphantly raking all six strings of the instrument before walking away down the street!
Frédéric Chopin
Boléro, Op. 19
Ironically and interestingly, Chopin’s Boléro was composed in Paris before his disastrous trip to Mallorca, already reflecting the 19th-century French aristocratic obsession with Spanish exoticism (yes, the Spanish wanted to be French, the French wanted to be Spanish.) This was forty years before Bizet’s Carmen and almost a full century before Ravel’s Boléro, to orient you historically, and stands as Chopin’s very first foray into the Mediterranean sound world. It also proved, to an extent, that Spanish folk dance rhythms could be successfully elevated into high concert art for the elite European stage.
In his Op. 19, Chopin treats the traditional dance as an expansive operatic narrative. Three specific sensory elements stand out: the castanet “spine” (strict, clicking triple meter in the left hand, driven by a sharp triplet on the first beat of every measure), the “Moorish” vocal ornaments (melodies twisting and turning, packed with winding trills) and the “waltz slip” (where the castanet triplets quietly melt away and give way to a smooth “boom-chich-chich” accompaniment.) If you can identify these in real time, you’ll be inside Chopin’s mind, seamlessly shifting between a dusty Spanish street and a high-society Paris salon!
Alicia De Larrocha (1923–2009)
Minué Triste
Sueño Infantil
Although most listeners would recognize the name Alicia De Larrocha – arguably one of the greatest classical pianists of the 20th century – she was, until recently, practically unknown as a composer. Being extremely self-critical, she shrugged off her creative efforts as sins of her youth and strictly forbade her compositions to be performed or published during her lifetime.
But how wonderful these pieces are! As seen within the broader picture of our “journey to Iberia”, Minué Triste (“Sad Minuet”) and Sueño Infantil (“Child’s Dream”) also remind us of the striking paradox between the “postcard Spain” of clicking castanets and roaring street festivals, and intimismo – that inward state expressed through silence, vulnerability and introspection. To me, both these pieces are great examples of what the Spanish mystics called Música Callada – “the music of silence”.
Frederic Mompou (1893–1987)
Canço i dansa No. 6
Many consider Mompou the highest authority on “music of silence” – and this work illustrates why. A native of Barcelona, Mompou was extremely shy and introverted, and despite considerable talent as a pianist, he abandoned a performance career entirely due to stage fright. His acoustic imagination was permanently shaped by his grandfather’s bell foundry – and the complex, lingering vibrations he heard as a child inspired him to pioneer signature, crushed dissonances known as “metallic chords”. This combination of a cloistered personality and an obsession with resonance resulted in a very particular aesthetic that is immediately audible in this piece from Cançons i danses.
It’s hard to look at any single piece from the monumental collection of “Songs and dances” (15 individual sets, written over a staggering 54-year span) in isolation, but Cançó i dansa No. 6 has a prominent distinction: Unlike most of the other pieces in the collection, it is built on completely original musical themes. The piece is divided into two halves: a slow Cançó (Song) with a deeply expressive melody that twists narrowly around a few central notes, and a Dansa (Dance) that suddenly breaks in with a crisp, syncopated rhythm influenced by Afro-Cuban beats. This transforms the mood from introverted prayer to an outgoing celebration.
Frédérdic Chopin
Prelude, Op. 28 No. 15 “Raindrop”
In a surprising shift of energy, Gabriela returns us to Chopin’s stormy winter in Mallorca. Although the famous “Raindrop” prelude is often (annoyingly!) played as a piece of pleasant, cozy, background music, we’re starkly reminded that it is anything but. The repeating G-flat / A-flat in the left, seen from this perspective, becomes more representative of a persistent, obsessive mental state, rather than a literal depiction of rain against a window. And while popular culture (or Spotify playlists) often has us listening to the serene outer sections, there is something truly terrifying about the middle section! It has the same “gothic” sense of doom as the Scherzo we heard earlier, with an almost desperate yearning in the treble. One can feel Chopin’s depth of fear and agony – physical and emotional – becoming almost overwhelmingly loud. When we return to the original theme, it feels like a complicated truce has been reached: The final pianissimo is not the whispering of blissful peace, but rather an expression of utmost fragility and exhausted resignation.
Enrique Granados
“Andaluza” from 12 Danzas españolas, Op. 37
I wouldn’t blame any listener today who’d mistakenly assume that this piece was originally written for classical guitar. In reality, “Andaluza” is a tribute to Granados’s brilliance at translating the physical demands and raw textures of Spanish guitar onto the piano keyboard: He represents the steady bass strum and the biting, syncopated melodies built on the “Andalusian cadence” with such aplomb that it’s hard to tell which came first!
Important background about the 12 Danzas españolas (a collection Granados started sketching as a 16-year-old and was only published seven years later) is that it established Granados’s international reputation overnight. Edvard Grieg publicly lauded the young Spaniard for introducing an entirely fresh, deeply poetic expression of national characteristics to the global stage. As Granados himself explicitly detailed, with reference to his so-called “invented folklore”: “My inspiration is founded above all in the singing of the people. Nevertheless, [these dances] are quite original and are no mere transcriptions.”
Franz Liszt (1811–1886)
Spanish Rhapsody, S. 254
What better way to conclude our journey than with a sweeping survey of the entire Iberian peninsula’s musical lineage? Structured as a set of free variations on two of Spain’s oldest and most iconic historical themes, the great virtuoso Liszt gives us his dazzling impressions of Spain and Portugal while also pushing the technical possibilities of the modern piano to its absolute limits!
Inspired by the massive concert tour of Portugal and Spain he undertook during 1844–1845, Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody is not only the byproduct of a turbulent and introspective period in his life (his Iberian tour marked the final break with his long-time romantic partner and mother of his three children, Marie D’Agoult), but also a striking example of the peculiar intersection of immediate impression and mature recollection. Although Liszt drafted an outline for a grand work entitled Grosse Concert-Phantasie über spanische Weisen (“Great concert phantasy over Spanish fields”) while in Lisbon in 1845, the Rhapsody as we’ll hear it today was only published in 1867 – more than twenty years later, once Liszt stopped touring, drew back from public life and was focused solely on composition.
Serving as the building blocks for what can call an “idealized musical recollection” are La folía (or Folies d’Espagne) – a slow, stately and deeply brooding dance theme of ancient Iberian origin, and the Jota Aragonesa – a rapid, joyful and highly animated folk dance in triple meter from northern Spain. By pairing these two opposing metrics, Liszt captures the the exact binary tension between blinding sunlight and cool shade (or: extroversion and introversion) that we find throughout Gabriela’s program. At a very basic level, as I wrote in the introduction, this is the ultimate light / shadow paradox at the very heart of what we hear as the “Spanish” aesthetic.