Two Works That Quote Each Other
By Jonathan Raabe
Corrado Margutti finished Rivers, Op. 104, in 2020. The guitarist Nicolò Spera commissioned it, and Margutti wrote it to be performed alongside a work that was already sixty-nine years old: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Romancero Gitano, Op. 152, of 1951.
That is the program on October 9, 10, and 11. Two works for choir and classical guitar, written sixty-nine years apart. The newer one opens by quoting the older one.
The quotation
The Romancero Gitano begins with a movement called “Baladilla de los tres ríos” — the little ballad of the three rivers, on a poem by Federico García Lorca. Rivers begins, after its Prologue, with a movement called “Balada de la placeta.”
The similarity is not an accident of Spanish titles. Margutti’s movement is a paraphrase of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s, written as an explicit homage and placed at the front of the cycle, so that the first thing the audience hears from the 2020 work is the 1951 work being acknowledged. The two pieces are introduced to each other before either has finished its opening number.
This is worth knowing in advance because it is easy to miss and impossible to un-hear. It is also, in about ninety seconds of music, the argument the whole evening is making.
What else is inside Rivers
Rivers is, to date, the largest work written for choir and guitar. It runs to seven movements and a Prologue, “Children in Need,” and it quotes a great deal more than the Romancero.
In “Herbsttag” there is Hindemith. In “Le cantique éternel, chanté dès l’exil” there are the French Romantics and there is Tárrega. And in “Noctis partes alteræ” there is Mozart — specifically the twelve-tone row that occurs, apparently by accident, in Don Giovanni, and which the composer Darius Milhaud was the first to notice, in 1953.
The scholars Martino Anibaldi and Diego Franciosi of the ITER Research Ensemble, who wrote the program note for the work, describe the result as “a kaleidoscope of forms, styles and images, which rotate around the themes of multiplicity and journey.” They also make a point worth repeating: the borrowings are not museum objects. They are the traces a traveler picks up.
The guitar is not the accompaniment
In most choral music with an instrument, the instrument supports. In Rivers it does not. Anibaldi and Franciosi put it this way: “the guitar is like a character in a continuous dialogue with the voices, hardly ever limited to the function of mere accompaniment.”
The same is true of the Romancero, where one of the seven movements, “La guitarra,” is a poem about the instrument the audience is watching being played.
Many rivers, one sea
Spera asked Margutti for a piece about immigration. Margutti declined to make it obvious. Asked about it, Spera said: “He just thought, rivers, the idea of rivers, why rivers? Because there are many rivers, but they all go to one sea.”
The score carries an epigraph from Cesare Pavese: “What world lies across this sea I do not know / but on the other side of every sea is another shore, and I will reach it.”
A work about many things becoming one current, which opens by absorbing the piece standing next to it. That is the season, stated by the music rather than about it.
The performances
Friday, October 9, 7:30 pm, Mountain View United Methodist Church, 355 Ponca Place, Boulder. Saturday, October 10, 7:30 pm, St. Paul Center for Music and the Arts, 1600 Grant Street, Denver; the Saturday performance is also available as a livestream. Sunday, October 11, 4:00 pm, United Church of Christ, 1500 9th Avenue, Longmont.
Tickets are at arsnovasingers.org. Nicolò Spera talked with us at length about the commission, his teachers, and the ten-string guitar; that conversation is here.
