giovedì 21 marzo 2013

Grondona plays Asturias music by Albeniz, Stradivarius 2009



The musicians are explorers, pathfinders as it existed once upon a time, like Livingstone, Stanley and even like Walter Bonatti, able to pick up maps written for them by some geographers of the past, maps to interpret, to decipher, from which start to explore and bring back a new representation of the territory. Do you think this is a strange idea? Try to think about the musical score as a map and the composer as a geographer who created it and the musician as the explorer who ventures with this map in his hands, which returns telling us the territory he explored playing this score. Each new performance, each new interpretation unfolds before us a new territory, a new representation of the score, which is text and map together at the same time, guidelines for the musician who must follow and at the same time revealing it by his own taste, its own personality, its own experience. How many times have we heard playing Asturias? How many times have we asked ourselves, again? Why is this question, which is not simply addressed to Asturias? Because sometimes happens that a musician is able to give a performance of a music getting such beauty and elegance that this new representation of the score becomes not only a landmark but the new canon style at which we feel an obligation, implicit or explicitly, to comply. It happens with Segovia and it will happen again. It’s like as facing his version we lack the forces, lack the courage to look for in the score, in the map a new representation, a new path, to explore an area that as visited by hordes of tourists we now believe that has exhausted its possibilities. This is perhaps the major difference between a real musician (explorer) and the simple tourist (the trivial interpreter): courage, culture, musical and emotional intelligence to be able to watch the score with new eyes and sensitivity, the ability to explore a new direction, to mark a new path, to show and represent things in a new perspective, perhaps, to create a new aesthetic and a new ethics. This is why I have to thank Stefano Grondona that collaboratively with the excellent Laura Mondiello has decided to offer us in closing 2009 this tribute to the music of Isaac Albeniz for the centenary of his death. Also for this occasion the Master gives us an essay of his art, exquisitely interpreting the music of Albeniz and managing the miracle to giving us new interpretations and new ways of listening to this music that are the most ever played by classical guitarists. As always, playing the original Torres, equipped with new ropes made by Aquila Corde, the two guitarists play twelve tracks (including the famous Asturias) demonstrating to the lazies and the losers that who wants to do be a musician does not need a tourist’s mentality but an explorer’s one, and that also in maps and in the most popular or played scores we can create new routes, managing to escape from the usual cliches and the usual stereotypes. Eventually, perhaps, as in a story by Borges, the geographer and explorer, will examine a single map on which are represented on all maps of the universe, then perhaps all the music will become a music only, or perhaps , a single sound .... I do not know. A great album recorded in perfect way by Davide Piva and mastered by Andrea Dandolo, with beautiful packaging and graphics edited by Patrizia Peruffo. Five Stars!

Nessun commento: