José Arriola (1896-1954)
Concertino pour piano et orchestre
Divertimento concertant pour 2 pianos et orchestre
6 Poésies de Antonio Machado (extraits)
Aqui lloro Don Quijote
Mal me guardareis
Marinero soy de amor
Concerto pour cor et orchestre

Carmen Duran, soprano
Ainhoa Zubillaga, alto
Javier Franco, baryton
Francisco Santiago, ténor
David Fernandez Alonso, cor
Joaquin Soriano, piano
Victor & Luis del Valle, piano duo
Real Filharmonia de Galicia
Maximino Zumalave, direction

Les institutions galiciennes s’efforcent de façon assez compréhensible d’exhumer l’œuvre du « Mozart brigantino », enfant prodige dont les jeunes années sont encore nimbées de légende, dont le destin familial est marqué de divers drames et dont les compositions disparurent pour l’essentiel dans le bombardement de Berlin à la fin de la 2nde Guerre mondiale. Si cette livraison d’enregistrements inédits de la musique associée à sa dernière période nous propose des compositions d’un intérêt devenu évidemment anecdotique, compte tenu du contexte de la production musicale européenne de l’époque, on pourra notamment apprécier les pièces concertantes pour piano(s) et orchestre, qui ne sont pas sans rappeler le caractère à la fois poétique et dynamique illustré par Falla ou Rachmaninov dans ce type de formation. Les deux œuvres vocales de même que le Concerto pour cor ne semblent pas bénéficier, à mon sens, de la même inspiration. Au total, l’ensemble manque donc certainement d’un peu de souffle. De prochaines publications regardant la musique de chambre ou l’œuvre pianistique sont annoncées : souhaitons qu’au-delà de l’inventaire après décès, il s’agisse, grâce à des interprétations inspirées, davantage de résurrection que d’exhumation. (Alain Monnier)

These are the first-ever recordings of music composed by José (Pepito) Arriola, whose works are virtually unknown. Born in Betanzos in the northern Spanish region of Galicia in 1895, Arriola was a celebrated child prodigy known at the time as a ‘Galician Mozart’, who dazzled audiences across Europe and American with his pianoplaying. Most of Arriola’s work was lost when his home in Berlin was destroyed during the Second World War. The manuscripts for the three concertos and two song-cycles presented here were discovered just a few years ago, and mysteriously vanished almost as soon as they had been photocopied for dissemination. They were composed in the final decade of Arriola’s life: in 1946 he settled in Barcelona, where he lived quietly until his death in 1954. Arriola’s music belongs to the second golden age of Spanish music, that of Albéniz, Granados, Turina and Falla (and, a little later, Joaquín Rodrigo), flavoured by nationalism and the rich Spanish folk tradition, along with a verismo that concerned itself with the ordinary people of Spain and their suffering (as mirrored in Carmen, or Candela in El amor brujo). Yet in common with other post-Romantic composers, Arriola sought out a world of vanished beauty, experimenting with colour, texture, unusual tonal combinations and harmony full of colour, sensuality and emotion. As a student in Leipzig, Arriola had been taught by Richard Strauss, and his teacher’s influence may be heard to positive effect in both the soaring vocal lines of the Tres textos cervantinos and the transplanted Classical idiom of the Horn Concerto. The piano-writing in the Concertino and Divertimento concertante is more compact and Stravinskian, while two songs from the cycle of Seis poesías de Antonio Machado disclose yet another, more impassioned facet of Arriola’s style.