Avi Avital
Between Worlds: Iberia
Musical Performance Ensemble & Orchestra 0Mandolinist Avi Avital has long enjoyed crossing musical borders. This season, he brings a series of three concerts to the Pierre Boulez Saal that reflect his wide-ranging inspiration and interests. Between Worlds is an exploration of different genres, cultures, and musical worlds: at the center of the project is the Between Worlds Ensemble, founded by Avital in 2014 and consisting of ten classically trained musicians who are equally at home in non-classical repertoire. For each of the three concerts, this core group will be joined by several artists or an ensemble representing a specific cultural and geographical region from around the world, in programs including classical pieces as well as traditional and folk music in newly created arrangements. “The sense of being at home in places that seem foreign and even discovering aspects of yourself there is an idea that I find very moving,” says Avital. “That philosophy is at the heart of this project.” To open the series, Marina Heredia, one of today’s most fascinating voices of flamenco, will become part of the Between Worlds Ensemble, joined by José Quevedo “Bolita” and Paquito Gonzalez for a program dedicated to music from the Iberian Peninsula.
The video livestream was opened to the general public.
The recording of the concert will be released at a later date available to members of Pierre Boulez Saal Online only. Learn more about our new online membership.
Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909)
Sevilla aus Suite española (1886)
Bearbeitung von Efrain Oscher
Manuel de Falla (1876–1946)
Andaluza aus Cuatro Piezas españolas für Klavier (1906–09)
Bearbeitung von David Bruce
El Uvero (traditionelles Flamenco-Lied)
Manuel de Falla
Canción del amor dolido aus El amor brujo (1915)
Bearbeitung von David Bruce
Malagueña con Fandangos del Albaicín (traditionelles Flamenco-Lied)
Enrique Granados (1867–1916)
Oriental aus Danzas españolas op. 37 (1888/89)
Bearbeitung von Jonathan Keren
Manuel de Falla
Canción del fuego fatuo und Danza del juego del amor aus El amor brujo (1915)
Bearbeitung von David Bruce
Intermission
Manuel de Falla
Danse espagnole aus La vida breve (1904)
Bearbeitung von Ohad Ben-Ari
Traditionelle Flamenco-Lieder
En los brazos de mi madre
Bulerias
Traditionelle Ladino-Lieder
Esta Montaña d’enfrente
Una Maica de Ruda
La Peterana
A la una yo Naci
Bearbeitung von Jonathan Keren
Alegrías (traditionelles Flamenco-Lied)
Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
Zorongo und Sevillanas del siglo XVIII aus Canciones españolas antiguas
Bearbeitung von Enrike Sollinis
The dramaturgy underlying the first Between Worlds program involves a dialogue between Spanish composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the living folk traditions from across the Iberian Peninsula that inspired them—represented by Flamenco singer Marina Heredia, guitarist José Quevedo “Bolita,” and percussionist Paquito González.
Manuel de Falla likely began writing his piano suite Piezas españolas while still living in Madrid and completed it in Paris in 1909. The four pieces provide a fitting introduction to the span of the Iberian Peninsula (and an image of the distant New World, where de Falla would find refuge from Franco and his fascists decades later). As the composer put it: “My chief idea when composing them was to employ music to express the soul and atmosphere of each of the regions mentioned in their respective titles.” The Impressionism that de Falla absorbed from his admired French colleagues adds a further layer of complexity, as Modernist trends meet up with the folkloric impulse.
The vital rhythms and passionate intensity of the last of these pieces, Andaluza, pays homage to de Falla’s native region in southern Spain, with which the flamenco tradition is so closely linked. The composer responded in fascinatingly varied ways to this tradition in several works, such as the Siete canciones populares españolas, also completed in Paris. Yet he adapted the tradition using an operatic mezzo-soprano. The set of traditional flamenco songs performed by Marina Heredia reconsiders the source tradition and, as Avital explains, “brings us the real thing with her folk singing style, which represents a very ancient culture.”
The centerpiece of the program is one of de Falla’s most important flamenco-inspired works, El amor brujo, which he introduced back in Spain following his sojourn in Paris. (The outbreak of World War I had compelled the composer to return to Madrid.) El amor brujo, often translated “The Sorcerer Love,” began as a mix of dance, song, and text prompted by the legendary Romani flamenco singer and dancer known as Pastora Imperio. The reception of its 1915 premiere was mixed, with some critics lamenting de Falla’s reliance on “foreign influences” absorbed while abroad in Paris. The work underwent several stages of revision and reconception before the composer introduced the “pantomime ballet” that eventually entered the repertoire. To create the work, he explained, he used ideas “that are invariably popular in character, some of them taken from Pastora Imperio herself, who sings them following tradition… [It is] always the popular motif, clad in a technique suited to its character, so that the two form a homogeneous ‘whole.’”
The story, to a libretto by María de la O Lejárraga García, similarly went through several modifications. It revolves around the obstacles that the beautiful Andalusian Romani Candelas must overcome to be united with her true love, Carmelo. The impassioned cante jondo or “deep song” tradition of flamenco is represented in the Canción del amor dolido (Song of a Broken Heart) introducing Candelas. To escape the haunting by her dead, philandering husband—his ghost pursues her in the tarantella Danza del terror—Candelas unsuccessfully attempts a ritual dance. Lucía, one of her husband’s lovers, is introduced in Canción del fuego fatuo (Song of the Will-o’-the-Wisp), which Miles Davis reimagined in his Sketches of Spain. Lucía is persuaded to trick the ghost and dance with him in Danza de juego de amor (Dance of the Game of Love). This allows Candelas and Carmelo to exchange “the kiss of perfect love” in the finale.
“De Falla is a saint, a mystic. I venerate no one else as much as de Falla,” confessed fellow Andalusian Federico García Lorca. As much as the composer was devoted to literature, the poet, his junior by 22 years, was deeply involved with music throughout his life. Lorca developed an intense friendship with de Falla, and the two collaborated on several projects that explored their mutual fascination with flamenco folk tradition. Lorca created his own arrangements of flamenco songs for voice and piano, Canciones españolas antiguas. He resisted committing them to paper but recorded them in 1931 with the singer Encarnación López (known as “La Argentinita”), playing the role of piano accompanist.
Enrique Granados is another composer who pioneered the incorporation of flamenco and other indigenous Spanish folklore into classical contexts during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His 22 dozen Danzas españolas, published in 1890, translate these idioms into piano music, which in turn is reconfigured for the Between Worlds Ensemble in Jonathan Keren’s arrangements.
The tradition of flamenco-related folklore, declared by UNESCO to be one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of humanity, is vast and encompasses singing, dancing, and instrumental music that has been classified according to particular styles, rhythms, and song types. Bulerías and alegrías, for example, are associated with lighter, festive forms of flamenco song, often featuring fast rhythms and, on guitar, variants of the vigorous rasgueado technique of strumming. Malagueña con fandango is noted for its virtuosic ornamentation and microtonal embellishments of the melody.
Flamenco is also a language eminently suited to conveying loss and profound heartache—a quality it might be said to share with the rich legacy of Ladino song created by the Sephardic Jewish community. Originating in medieval Spain and Portugal, this musical tradition spread through the Mediterranean world and from Morocco to Turkey following the expulsion of the Jews from Iberia in the 1490s. Similar to Yiddish, which developed from the fusion of Hebrew and German among Ashkenazi communities, Ladino is a blend of Castilian Spanish and Hebrew described by the Ladino singer Sarah Aroeste as a “pan-Mediterranean language crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries.”
–Thomas May
Avi Avital’s album Between Worlds, released in 2014, not only continued his ongoing quest to expand the repertoire of his instrument, the mandolin, but broke new ground in his exploration of the connections between classical idioms and the vitality of authentic folk sources. Together with his ten-member Between Worlds Ensemble, Avital brings a series of three programs to the Pierre Boulez Saal this season illuminating the interactions between these realms and the musicians who interpret them.
What inspired you to create the Between Worlds Ensemble?
I navigate a triangle that involves a specific genre of classical music associated with cultural identity, the instrument that I play, and my own cultural or artistic identity. Regarding the first angle, at the beginning of the 20th century there was a stream of making art music—or so-called “classical music”—that was influenced by some kind of national cultural identity. Many composers practiced this by taking folk melodies from their own culture and turning them into art music. They did so by harmonizing the folk sources differently or by restructuring them or even by presenting them in formal contexts, such as a sonata, to introduce the complexity and finesse of classical music. Still another way was to adapt this material to classical concert instrumentation like the piano or string quartet.
Who are some of the composers you’re thinking of in this context?
Béla Bartók maybe is the best example. He went around chasing these melodies and taping them using rather primitive recording devices. Back in his studio, he reimagined them as works for piano, string quartet, orchestra, and so on. A few decades earlier, Antonín Dvořák composed pieces inspired by his Bohemian folk music heritage—before he was hired to help Americans with this practice by integrating spirituals and American folk music into a classical context. The same thing happened in the 20th century in South America with composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos or Astor Piazzolla, who brought tango into the concert hall. In Spain and on the Iberian Peninsula, the area we explore in this first program, there were composers like Manuel de Falla, Enrique Granados, and Isaac Albéniz. With the Between Worlds Ensemble project, we are commissioning composers and arrangers who are living today to do exactly the same thing.
For audiences at the time, bringing something from the folk culture to the concert hall must have felt very modern and exciting and innovative. What made it folkloric in the first place, and what makes it classical music? And, more interestingly, how do you translate the same action for a 21st-century audience, where everyone is literally two clicks away from every kind of music in the world? How do we play on listeners’ expectations, given the current state of the ceremonial rules of the concert hall? How do I guide the live audience into this experience that I want to evoke of going back and forth from folklore to classical?
Your instrument, the mandolin, plays a key role in trying to recapture that sense of excitement for an audience of today …
The mandolin has always enjoyed an ambiguous identity somewhere between folk tradition and classical music. It’s an 18th-century Baroque Italian instrument, but the collective notion is much more associated with folk than art music. Vivaldi wrote for the mandolin, but it’s also a symbol for Neapolitan folk songs. The mandolin is used for bluegrass music or in Brazil for choro music. I realized that the instrument has the ability to dialogue with these origins, so when I play Italian classical music inspired by folk sources on a mandolin it sounds more Italian, or when I play the “American” Quartet by Dvořák on a mandolin it sounds blue-grassy. The music has all these references both from the instrument and in a broader sense from a folkloristic sound.
So when I was thinking of how to translate the action of the composers I mentioned from 100 or so years ago to today, this became one element. The mandolin itself carries a lot of these folkloristic references. The musicians of the Between Worlds Ensemble are not bound to a single style of music—they are fully aware of the folk origins of what we play, so there is a back and forth between the first seed of inspiration of these composers and the way we perform and refilter it for a modern audience in a concert hall.
What about your own cultural background and artistic identity—how do they relate to the vision you’re exploring with the Between Worlds Ensemble?
I grew up in a deeply multicultural environment, having been born to Israeli parents from Morocco; the parents of everyone in my class came from different countries. Playing in a mandolin orchestra run by our conservatory gave me my education in classical music. We played Bach and Mozart and Beethoven but also folk music from America, Israel, Russia, and Italy. This is how my artistic identity was formed. So for me classical music wasn’t a bubble world. It was one of many dialects, along with jazz and folk—one of many ways to generate an experience for the listener that involves the universal elements of music. For me, all these borders were very blurry. I was drawn to taking the nuances from each one of these dialects and discovering what the mechanism inside was. That led me to become very interested in many other genres. I was playing a lot of folk, klezmer, or Balkan music; I improvised; I would play with jazz musicians. It’s within this kind of versatility that I see the Between Worlds Ensemble.
The ensemble combines woodwinds, strings, and percussion …
I chose a formation of instruments that would lend itself to be flexible, like a chameleon, to interact with varying references from folk music. The percussion is the most immediately folk-like element and adds the raw idea of rhythm. The flute you hear in many different cultures, and the strings can go back and forth from a classical ensemble sound to enhancing and blending with a folkloristic sound. The plucked strings of the harp complement the sound of the mandolin. There is no piano because it’s definitely a Western classical instrument.
But it’s not only about the sounds, it’s just as much about the instrumentalists—musicians who, like myself, do not play only classical music but also improvise and have wide-ranging experience performing different genres of music that feed each other. The people I chose for this ensemble, in one way or another, have this in common. They are curious, they are not bound to a specific way of playing or school of thought, and they are constant explorers of the nuances that help us recognize what makes one type of folk music different from another.
What is the relationship between these core members of the Between Worlds Ensemble and the guest artists joining them as part of your Pierre Boulez Saal residency?
One part of what the ensemble does is to take music written by classical composers—much of it from the beginning of the 20th century—who were inspired by folk sources. On the other side of the spectrum is the authentic stuff, the UNESCO heritage level of preservation of those traditions that have survived without reharmonizing, restructuring, retouching. This is the element that the guest musicians are bringing to their interactions with the ensemble. As a result, we have the classical pieces, the folklore, and everything that’s in the middle. This current incarnation of the Between Worlds Ensemble takes the triangle that I have described to the next level.
What should audiences be listening for, and what do you hope they will take away from these concerts?
I want to walk the audience through an experience that includes opposing forces, that goes back and forth from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from classical finesse to the spontaneity of an ancient tradition. Hopefully this tension between different genres of music, between different approaches, between the new and the old will evoke some thoughts about identity and universalism and offer an experience that is rich and new and reflective of our times.
Interview: Thomas May
The interview originally published in the Pierre Boulez Saal program book for the performance "Between Worlds" on November 23, 2022.