Werthmuller:Goran Krivokapic

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8.557809 - Guitar Recital: Goran Krivokapic

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Goran Krivokapi - Guitar Recital
Werthmller J.S. Bach D. Scarlatti Bogdanovi
Franz Werthmllers music sits comfortably between Joseph Haydn, 37 years older, and Fernando Sor, nine years older.
Though closer in time to Sor, he seems to have absorbed more of the older composers style, at least in the brisk
Allegro that opens his Sonata in A major, Op. 17, in a high-spirited fashion, and in the exhilarating momentum of the
Presto that concludes it. Haydn, who liked to finish his symphonies with an uptempo movement, might have approved.
The warm and eloquent melody of the Lento, however, is more of Werthmllers time, at the beginning of the Romantic
movement that was to usher in Weber, Schumann and Chopin. The sonata was transcribed, presumably from a piano
version, by the nineteenth-century Austrian guitarist and composer Franz Pfeifer.
Good, great and universal music remains the same no matter what instrument sounds the notes. The opinion of
Ferruccio Busoni, composer, piano virtuoso and arranger of formidable skill, is almost universally echoed by modern
musicians and musicologists, but the old belief that it is somehow wrong to play violin music on the guitar still persists
in some quarters. Bach himself was a habitual transcriber and arranger, and that surely ought to be enough to
convince the doubtful. The advantages of a guitar transcription include a great clarity in polyphony while still retaining
an essentially string sound. Bach himself arranged movements from his Violin Sonatas, so guitar arrangers and
transcribers are not working in the dark. Nevertheless, decisions have to be made - when, or if, to arpeggiate chords,
as the violin necessarily must when more than two adjacent strings are involved; whether to expand a violins fournote
chord with the guitars two additional strings, whether to acknowledge that it was originally a violin piece or whether to
treat it as a new piece for guitar, and so on. It is known that Bach owned a lute, though whether he could play it with
any degree of proficiency is uncertain: in performance he remained a keyboardplayer par excellence. Busoni, among
whose students was Sibelius, was an arch-romantic, as his arrangement for piano of Bachs D minor Chaconne shows.
A generation later, Segovias Chaconne arrangement for guitar was much less romantic, though nowadays it would not
be considered to be in accordance with modern thinking and beliefs. An arrangement invariably echoes the perceptions
of its own time, not those of the period in which the work was originally composed. The demanding fugue of the
Sonata in C, BWV1005, is known familiarly among English-speaking guitarists as London Bridge, the melody of which
can be recognised in the opening bars, although obviously Bach had no knowledge of traditional English song.
Domenico Scarlattis father Alessandro was a significant figure in music, the composer of some six hundred chambercantatas. So attractive are the almost equal number of harpsichord sonatas written by his son Domenico, however,
that we tend to ignore his fathers great contribution. Graceful, spirited, yet full of technical problems for keyboardplayers and guitarists alike, these sonatas by the younger Scarlatti have a universal appeal that shows no sign of
diminishing. Together with Handel and J.S. Bach, Domenico Scarlatti was one of the three major composers of the
period, all born in 1685 and all giants in Baroque music. He actually competed, in a friendly way, with Handel, in an
event organized in Rome, when Handel was judged the better organist and Scarlatti the better harpsichordist. It said
that the two composers held each other in some esteem. Domenico Scarlatti was employed at the court of the King of
Portugal, where he taught the Infanta Maria Barbara, who became his favourite pupil and whom he followed to Spain,
where he spent the rest of his life. Although he wrote operas, cantatas and sacred music, the keyboard sonatas remain
his most memorable work, evidence of a deep fascination with the possibilities of a single instrument with its
opportunities for melody, counterpoint and polyphony. Bachs sometimes lengthy working-out of a contrapuntal
pattern, as in the fugue of BWV1005, was not for Scarlatti, who was more interested in the brilliant effect of rapid
articulation, often in thirds and sixths, and many other technical devices such as hand-crossing, wide leaps and
elaborate arpeggiation, though there is poetry and profundity there too. As to his musics suitability for the guitar, it is
sufficient to point to his many years of residence in Spain, where exposure to that instrument must have been a daily
occurrence; there are many echoes in his music that support the view that the guitar must have made a deep
impression. Some of the sonatas are impossible to play adequately on one guitar, for the simple reason that, while a
keyboard player has ten independent digits, a guitarist needs both hands to play one note. A great many of the
sonatas, however, transcribe very well, and the gradual improvement in guitar technique over the last twenty or thirty
years means that more and more of them are falling into the scope of the guitar. Scarlattis own introduction to the
first published sonatas warns the player against being too critical, to be aware instead of the humanity and thereby to
increase by this way your own pleasure. Certainly this humanity is an important part of his music, and a factor in its
continuing popularity. The three sonatas played here are fairly representative of Scarlattis vivid style, slow alternating
with fast, the deceptively simple technique of K. 208 contrasting with the fireworks of K. 209.
Duan Bogdanovic was born in Belgrade and knows the rhythms of his native Serbia very well. It is interesting,
therefore, that his first musical interests were rock, pop, jazz and South American music. His eventual realisation that
Balkan music is generously endowed with its own unique rhythms has resulted in a steady flow of compositions that
have enriched the contemporary repertoire. The very opening of Sonata No. 2 seems to breathe a Balkan air, and this
underlying rhythm pervades the entire work, binding the movements together as strongly as any of the more formal
structures of Western music. It is at its most prominent in the concluding Allegro ritmico, where it supports some
fingerwork of an almost oriental intricacy, a challenge for any guitarist, but a delight for the listener. The intervening
movements, one as slowly expressive as its title indicates, the other with the seemingly contradictory title of
melancholy joke, complete a sonata very much of our time, complex yet as rich in inventiveness as any classical
sonata of the past, though perhaps more in terms of rhythm than of harmonic structure.
2005 Colin Cooper
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