Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Concerto pour guitare - The Divan of Moses Ibn Ezra Locatto Weyhenmeyer

En 1939, Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco est sur le point de quitter l’Italie pour mettre sa famille en sécurité face aux lois antisémites du pouvoir fasciste mais avant de gagner les Etats-Unis, la présence à ses côtés d’Andres Segovia le convainc d’écrire un Concerto pour guitare. Ce sera son op. 99, œuvre magnifique dotée d’une grande fraîcheur d’inspiration et de mélodies inoubliables. Soutenu par un orchestre cotonneux et vibratile, le guitariste Pietro Locatto y apporte sensualité et volupté tactile, enrichissant ici une discographie déjà abondante sans démériter. L’intérêt principal de ce Songs from Exile est le cycle composé d’après le poète juif espagnol Moses Ibn Ezra en 1966 par Castelnuovo-Tedesco soit deux ans avant sa mort. Suite de dix-neuf courts poèmes qui narre l’exil, l’errance, les désillusions, la nostalgie, l’amitié, l’acceptation du destin et de la mort (Epilogue). Le compositeur s’identifiant dans un processus d’anamnèse aussi bien au poète qu’au "Wanderer" de Schubert. La voix clairette de la soprano Ronja Weyhenmeyer semble ici voleter sur les chiffonnades de la guitare, offrant une belle lisibilité et une profonde émotion au recueil. (Jérôme Angouillant)

This musical proposition combines two compositions created about 30 years apart, in two different countries and moments of life, but that emerge from the same feelings well portrayed in the poetic and autobiographic citations above. Formally they are very different music pieces, but they both describe the emotional introspection of a man that narrates through music his own condition as an exile. The Concerto per chitarra e orchestra op.99 is brought to life at the end of 1938: Mario CastelnuovoTedesco is in Florence and the latest Christmas vacation in Italy is filled with concern for him, the racial laws that came into effect make his and his family’s life intolerable. Almost thirty years later Mario CastelnuovoTedesco, two years before his death, comes back to this theme so dear to him and relives it again intensely, with decidedly more bitter and disenchanted undertones, through an alterego that experienced, 900 years before him, a similar fate (as to almost underline the historical cycles of humanity and its mistakes). Moses Ibn Ezra (1055/60 1138?) was a Spanish poet, of Jewish religion, who was forced to flee from his Granada possibly following family conflicts, but maybe after the Almoravidi Arabs conquered the city and enforced a cultural regime less tolerant towards the jew minorities compared to the previous Arab domains. The Diwan (or Divan) is a collection of short poems, often sang, typical of the jewish culture, but also of the Arab one and, in particular, the one from elAndalus, the Spain under Arab rule.