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ABOUT THE PROGRAM PETER HALSTEAD
Every piece that Julien plays is cut from the same fabric as Julien’s own sense of languid evening, rainy afternoon, and sun-dappled morning. Mompou, Bortkiewicz, Ravel are Julien. Julien’s own compositions are echoes of Sundays in the park, slow lunches under the village chestnut tree, summer nights filled with the songs of crickets.
FEDERICO MOMPOU (1893–1987) Paisajes (Landscapes)
Federico Mompou is the great unknown Impressionist, the philosopher of desolate and lavish countrysides trapped inside urban courtyards, the way he felt himself trapped in cities.
His family made bells, and the sound never left him. At
one point he tried to revive their foundry. He never left the playground, the beach, the park. His world was one of children, tinged with the sadness of having grown up. Paisajes (Landscapes) is in three parts, written in 1942, 1947, and 1960.
La fuente y la campana (The Fountain and the Bell): Although we use both to judge the passing of time, the linearity of minutes flowing around us, Mompou understands that time has no signature. There is no prescribed tempo for existence. It simply exists. As the saying goes, only man divides time into sections; man is the great divider. For Mompou, time condemns us, removes
us from the innocence of childhood, and so time must be resisted. There are no demands made; you don’t have to get home in time or be turned into a pumpkin. Landscapes don’t have to be finished.
Mompou isn’t describing a courtyard (with its bell and foun- tain) in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona near the cathedral where he was strolling with his girlfriend, later his wife. He was 64, she was 34, and they heard the cathedral’s chimes
at midnight, which Orson Welles would use in his film, Chimes at Midnight, about the carousing of the peripheral characters who surrounded Prince Hal’s intemperate youth. Falstaff states: “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.” Shakespeare, Welles, and Mompou see through the sensuousness of the metaphor to its underlying suggestion of mortality. We have heard the chimes in the past, but they’re over. Mompou is meditating on the sounds of children playing, on the quality of the light on the stone, on the calm of the water, on the timbre of the bell.
And what Mompou has discovered in the air of that jubi- lant and frenetic district is a music unlike any other. Like Frédéric Chopin or Dylan Thomas, there is no precedent for Mompou; he has no school, and no followers. (Although he has found a home in the soul of Julien Brocal, whose own pieces live in the same airy countryside.)
El lago (The Lake) was inspired by Barcelona’s Montjuïc Park. It isn’t so much a lake as the way wind becomes visible on it, the way it reflects the surrounding landscape. Debussy’s and Ravel’s rain is onomatopoetic, an imitation of water striking a surface; but Mompou’s water is a song sung by the leaves reflected on it, briefly disrupted by ripples.
Carros de Galicia (Carts of Galicia) was inspired by the rural, autonomous community in northwestern Spain. It was the homeland of the Gallaeci, a Celtic people, and was later ruled by the Romans, the Visigoths, and for a time was its own kingdom. Here is the creaking of the lumbering carts of the farmland paths of this otherwise oceanic region, ending with a flashback from the fountain.
SERGEI BORTKIEWICZ (1877–1952) Seven Preludes, Op. 40
Sergei Bortkiewicz spent his childhood on the countryside Ukrainian estate of his noble Polish parents and studied
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The Music at Tippet Rise