Sonata (1990) Leo Brouwer

para guitarra sola

Inhalt:

Fandangos y boleros (1. Satz )
Sarabanda de Scriabin (2. Satz)
La toccata de Pasquini (3. Satz)

Written in 1990 for the great British guitarist Julian Bream, Leo Brouwer's Sonata is in three movements, but it does not follow any neo-classical line and instead explains the stylistic features typical of the Cuban master's art, in this case turned to the European tradition, but not to observe its formal canons, but to engage in a witty parody of certain aspects of sonata rhetoric, from Spanish and Italian Baroque to late Romanticism, exposed to the colourful glare of the Caribbean light. The first movement, entitled Fandangos y Boleros , opens with a broad and varied Preámbulo, whose rapid and imaginative figurations seem to set the mood for an ornate discourse like a Maritime poem. This pompous introduction leads to a dance whose main metre explains the title of the movement. The nucleus of this section is a very simple interval in the second major, around which the composer builds a luxuriant decoration in expansion, alternating the scansion of the leading rhythm with dense flourishes. The development is very broad, expanding into a sort of polyphonic invention in three voices, characterised by the rhythm and profile of the central voice. The reprise of the dance theme is anything but symmetrical, as it leads to new developments, and finds an unpredictable outcome in the coda, which begins by announcing the first theme of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, broken up by the wedge-shaped insertion of fragments of the dance theme: the words "Beethoven visits Father Soler" explain Beethoven's mysterious apparition and the inspiration behind the whole piece, which is a reinterpretation of the music of the great Spanish harpsichordist Antonio Soler, a pupil of Domenico Scarlatti.

We do not know of a piece in Scriabin's music that could have been the specific model for Scriabin's Sarabanda, which forms the central movement of Brouwer's Sonata. Perhaps the composer intended to refer in general to the fervent and ardent climate of Scriabin's piano music. The piece begins with a light and subtle rhythmic-harmonic texture on which the thematic motif of four semiquavers is drawn. Once the airy introduction is over, the real homage to Scriabin begins, that is, a polyphonic section in three voices, which expands in the metric of 4/4, placing the motif and its expansions in the inner voice. The re-establishment of the tempo of the Sarabande takes place in the concluding section, which takes up the elements of the introduction and fades them out. The third movement has a title - La Toccata de Pasquini - reminiscent of the compositional style of the master from Pistoia, in which the lower part, in ternary rhythm, designs the harmony and the upper part sketches some binary cells in the high register, evoking birdsong (one inevitably thinks of Pasquino's Toccata with the Scherzo del Cucco). The piece is a sort of perpetual motion that allows itself a single re spiro, where the Sarabande is briefly recalled, but only to resume with a Da capo the enthusiastic Toccata and conclude it in glory.