Colom: Variantes y Desvaríos

Description

Back in August 2022 during the long-standing "Music in Compostela" course held yearly in Santiago de Compostela where I was a student just over 50 years ago and where I have worked as a piano teacher for over ten years now, I received a proposal from my friend, the musicology professor José Sierra, who also works in Santiago. His proposal involved my learning the Sonata del Gallo (Sonata of the Cockerel) by Father Antoni Soler in four days so as to play it just before the similarly-sounding villancico by the same author was performed and thus display their obvious similarities. I naturally decided to play it with embellishments and interpolations typical of the period it was written in. On returning home, the fact of having worked with this piece so intensely over a short period of time meant that my mind was still thinking about the sonata. I decided to continue improvising with the piece, moving further and further away from the musical aesthetics of eighteenth-century Spain towards a polytonalism on the boundaries of atonalism whilst not losing the humorous side to Soler's original piece. Finally, I decided to write produce a composition with these strange ‘deliriums' within the original concept of a Spanish Baroque sonata and even including space for a ‘cadenza'. José Sierra and myself have decided to dedicate this piece to the memory of Manuel Carra, the recently-deceased excellent and widely-respected pianist and composer from Malaga. He generously devoted a great part of his life to music teaching with wonderful results and for some years he was also a professor at "Music in Compostela". We believe this dedication is worthy as the seed of the piece was planted in Santiago de Compostela and Manuel Carra, with whom I was friends in an atmosphere of mutual admiration, had a keen sense of humour, as is quite common with people from Malaga. Variantes y Desvaríos (Variations and Deliriums) makes more sense if the piece Sonata del Gallo is played immediately afterhand with no repetitions and few embellishments. for this reason we are publishing them together in this work. I hope that both piano players and listeners will enjoy the piece. Josep Colom