Abrazando: Latin Embrace CD In Review
Abrazando: Latin Embrace
Rosa Antonelli, piano
Albany Records TROY 1571
A beguiling CD just landed on my review desk, the sort of music that makes one long for a warm summer day and a cold drink to enhance the enjoyment. Rosa Antonelli, long a specialist in and advocate for lesser-known Spanish and Latin-American repertoire, has here assembled a dessert cart full of delicious and tempting treats.
Not all of the composers or works on Abrazano: Latin Embrace are in fact unknown: Piazzolla, Villa-Lobos, Albeniz, and Lecuona need no introduction. But many will have never heard a work by Gianneo, Ponce, or Williams (the latter composer was my first encounter as well). Even in the better-known composers, however, she has either selected the non-obvious pieces, or made her own transcriptions of non-piano originals, a skill to be commended, as it was once assumed that all virtuosi had such gifts at their command.
She plays two of Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons” of Buenos Aires, Spring and Summer, with great poetry and longing, amid the angular musical gestures of the tango underlying all: the seduction, rejection, re-approach, and eventual union of two imaginary dancers in the brothel district.
Villa-Lobos is represented by his Bachianas Brasilerias No. 4, its Prelude movement showing the “Brazilian Bach” at his most neo-baroque, with perfectly descending sequences that satisfy the ear to no end.
The music of Ernesto Lecuona used to be in the piano bench of every amateur pianist, mainly for his Malagueña or the other number from that suite, which had words added, The Breeze and I. Ms. Antonelli instead gives us two little gems: The Bell-flower and Vals maravilloso (Marvelous Waltz), both salon trifles that gain by being handled so poetically. The fading and slowing bell sounds in the first piece were absolutely ravishingly portrayed.
This brings me to my only quibble about the recording as a whole: I wish it had been done in a concert hall or other larger theater with a natural acoustic, as the engineering and miking are too close, giving the beautiful Steinway and Ms. Antonelli a sort-of choked sound at times, lacking in atmosphere. Also, at fifty-nine minutes, there was room for several more of her wonderful rarities, for the budget-conscious CD buyer.
La misma pena (The Same Sadness) and Llanto negro (Black Tears) by Piazzolla are appropriately heart-tugging. Albeniz is represented by one of his dozens of salon pieces: the charming Champagne Waltz from the 1880s (prior to his embrace of Impressionism combined with Spanish folksong and pictorial color, which culminated in the masterpiece Iberia). The Mexican composer Manuel Ponce (1882-1948) sounds like a Latin Chopin or Schumann in the Intermezzo and Romanza de Amor played here.
Ms. Antonelli then returns to Piazzolla with two more of his nuevo tango items: Nunca, nunca te olvide (I will never, never forget you) and Libertango. The Argentinian Alberto Williams (1862-1952) has a touching Reverie, despite his non-Spanish sounding name, one hears the similar soul sounds as the others on this CD. The disc closes with the more rambunctious pieces by Luis Gianneo (1897-1968) Tres Danzas Argentinas (Three Argentine Dances): Gato, Tango, and Chacarera, topics also taken up by Ginastera, of the generation directly after Williams’.
Dare I use the dangerous word “definitive” to describe Ms. Antonelli’s innate understanding of this style and these composers? I fear I must, and I’m confident that she will continue to unearth and program the best of this unique culture and its music.
