CASALS, Pablo: Encores and Transcriptions, Vol. 1 (1925-1928)_音乐专辑
CASALS, Pablo: Encores and Transcriptions, Vol. 1 (1925-1928)
又名: (1925-1928)
表演者: Casals, Pablo/Gendron, Edouard/Mednikoff, Nicolai
流派: 古典
专辑类型: 专辑
介质: CD
唱片数: 1
出版者: Naxos
条形码: 0636943197226
专辑简介
Unlike the ubiquitous violin, the cello was slow to establish itself in the recording studio. The great Polish player Aleksandr Wierzbilowicz, a friend of Tchaikovsky, made a few 78rpm sides as early as 1904, and the distinguished Englishman W.H. Squire followed suit in 1906, going on to have an extremely successful recording career. In general, however, in the early twentieth century, the cello was restricted to providing soulful obbligati for singers; sometimes the cellist’s name was not even mentioned on the record label. The greatest cellist of the time, Pau (or Pablo) Casals, was ignored by the record companies — or possibly it was he who did the ignoring — until 1915, when he began a series for American Columbia (he always alleged that he had made discs in Paris about a decade earlier but no trace of them has been found). By now aged 38 and at the peak of his career, Casals was restricted by Columbia to short pieces (except for Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, which he did twice). He made his final Columbia discs in February 1924 and exactly a year later switched to the Victor Talking Machine Company, making two sides with the pianist Edouard Gendron. All of these discs were recorded by the acoustic process, in which the cellist had to play into a large horn and the piano (usually an upright) was raised off the ground so as to have its sound caught as directly as possible by the horn, but in the spring of 1925 recording companies in both America and Europe began to use the new process in which the sound was captured by an electrical process, using a microphone. For the first time it was possible to record music with some sort of fidelity; and this time Casals was among the pioneers — his initial electrical session was held just six weeks after his last acoustic session. The experiment was not terribly successful but within less than a year Casals was making records which many people consider his best.
This legendary musician was born on 29th December 1876 in Vendrell, a little town where his father was organist and choirmaster. ‘I owe nearly all my talent at music to the influence of my father,’ he wrote. ‘As soon as I could walk he took me to all the services at the church, so that the Gregorian chant, the chorales and the organ voluntaries became part of myself and of my daily life.’ Carlos Casals taught Pau to sing, play the piano and organ and even compose; at six the boy had mastered the violin well enough to play a solo in public. Fascinated by a broom handle strung like a cello, used by an itinerant Catalan musician, he described it to his father, who built him a little cello using a gourd for a sound-box. ‘On this home-made contrivance I learnt to play the many songs my father composed, and the popular songs which reached the village from the outside world.’ At the age of eleven he heard a real cello, which confirmed that it was the instrument for him. His father bought him a small one and gave him lessons; and soon he began studying at the Municipal School of Music in Barcelona. Cello playing had not greatly advanced since the days of Luigi Boccherini. The invention of the spike or end-pin had freed the body of the instrument from being gripped between the knees, so that it resonated more freely; but some players were still operating in the old way, without a spike. Worst of all, the bowing arm was restricted. ‘We were taught to play with a stiff arm and obliged to keep a book under the armpit’, recalled Casals. While playing in a café trio to pay for his keep, he was heard by the composer Albéniz. Soon he had an ensemble of seven at a grander café, and it was while he and his father were looking for music for this band to play that he found an edition of the Bach solo Suites. He met Sarasate and with Albéniz’s help moved to Madrid, found a patron and became Queen Maria Cristina’s favourite musician, studying at the Conservatory with Tomas Bretón and Jesus de Monasterio. He made his Madrid orchestral début with Lalo’s Cello Concerto and in 1899 played it at the Crystal Palace in London and the Lamoureux Concerts in Paris. In 1901 he toured America and in 1905 he settled in Paris.
Hot-blooded and temperamental, Casals had a high-profile affair with his Portuguese pupil Guilhermina Suggia and a failed marriage to the singer Susan Metcalfe. In public he was quickly recognised as the greatest cellist. Fritz Kreisler was making an impact with his subtle use of vibrato on the violin and Casals worked on similar lines with the cello, astonishing his peers with the freedom of his bowing, his use of ‘expressive intonation’ and his technical innovations. After working on the Bach Suites for a dozen years, he began playing them in public in the early years of the twentieth century, often programming one alongside a concerto. In 1919 he organised the Orquestra Pau Casals in Barcelona and in 1931 conducted it in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to mark the birth of the Spanish Republic. The civil war and the victory of Franco, however, caused a rift in Casals’s life and career. A man of deep principle who refused to play in Hitler’s Germany, he was implacably opposed to Franco’s régime and in 1939, threatened with execution if he returned to Spain, he went into exile in southern France. After World War II, feeling that Britain and America were appeasing Franco, he abruptly stopped playing in public, breaking off a London recording session with Haydn’s D major Concerto two-thirds done. Nevertheless from 1950 American admirers organized a festival around him at his new home town, Prades, and in his old age Casals had a new lease of life as chamber musician, teacher, conductor and musical guru. In 1956 he moved to his mother’s native country, Puerto Rico, and the following year he wed his young pupil Marta Monta?ez. He played in 1958 at the United Nations and in 1961 at the White House. He died in Puerto Rico on 22nd October 1973.
Pablo Casals was 48 when the first track on the present CD was recorded and 51 at the time of the last session represented here. In those days many string players were past their best at fifty, but few comparisons with Casals’s acoustic discs are needed to confirm that he was still in glorious form. As in his acoustic phase, the repertoire is mainly the ‘genre’ pieces that he would programme in his celebrity recitals, or as encores in more serious concerts. There are original cello pieces, by Saint-Sa?ns, Bruch, MacDowell and the great Czech cellist David Popper, who settled in Budapest and became the father of the modern Hungarian cello school. There are vocal pieces by Wagner, Godard and Fauré — the lovely song by the last-named is the best loved of all Casals’s own transcriptions, so popular with both cellists and listeners that it is now considered on a par with Fauré’s actual cello works. Then there are piano pieces by Schubert, Chopin, Schumann and Rubinstein, and piano duets by Debussy and Schumann — whose Abendlied is not to be confused with his song of the same title. The Intermezzo from Goyescas is an all-Catalan affair, music by Granados transcribed by Casals’s favourite pupil Gaspar Cassadó. Other famous string players represented are the German cellist Hugo Becker and his violinist compatriot August Wilhelmj. In these miniatures we catch much of the essence of Pablo Casals’s playing: the uninhibited rhythm and lusty, sometimes almost peremptory attack, the natural, breathing portamento, the parlando quality of some passages in which his bow virtually seems to utter words, the melting combination of tone and phrasing, going hand in hand with a subtly varied vibrato. Most of the transcriptions concentrate on the cello’s cantabile middle and upper-middle registers but in the Chopin Nocturne we get a glimpse of Casals’s sovereign command of the darker low register. To those who know the long-lived cellist only from his later recordings, these Victor discs, full of the sunshine of Casals in his heyday, should come as a revelation.
曲目
Transcriptions, Vol. 1 (1925-1928)
Popper, David
Casals, Pablo, arranger(s)
Chanson villageois, Op. 62, No. 2
1. Chanson villageois, Op. 62, No. 2 00:02:28
Hillemacher, Paul Joseph Guillaume
Casals, Pablo, arranger(s)
Gavotte tendre
2. Gavotte tendre 00:03:26
MacDowell, Edward
Casals, Pablo, arranger(s)
Romance, Op. 35
3. Romance, Op. 35 00:03:26
Debussy, Claude
Casals, Pablo, arranger(s)
Petit Suite: Menuet
4. Petit Suite: Menuet 00:02:43
Schubert, Franz
Becker, Irene, arranger(s)
Moment musical No. 3, Op. 94, D. 780
5. Moment musical No. 3, Op. 94, D. 780 00:03:08
Schumann, Robert
Becker, Irene, arranger(s)
Abendlied, Op. 85, No. 12
6. Abendlied, Op. 85, No. 12 00:03:55
Schumann, Robert
Kinderszenen (Scenes of childhood), Op. 15: VII. Traumerei (Dreaming) (arr. for cello and piano)
7. Kinderszenen (Scenes of childhood), Op. 15: VII. Traumerei (Dreaming) (arr. for cello and piano) 00:03:22
Faure, Gabriel
Casals, Pablo, arranger(s)
3 Songs, Op. 7: No. 1. Apres un reve (arr. Casals for cello and piano)
8. 3 Songs, Op. 7: No. 1. Apres un reve (arr. Casals for cello and piano) 00:03:01
Wagner, Richard
Tannhauser: Evening Star
9. Tannhauser: Evening Star 00:04:14
Wagner, Richard
Wilhelmj, August, arranger(s)
Die Meistersinger: Preislied
10. Die Meistersinger: Preislied 00:04:22
Chopin, Fryderyk
Sieveking, Martinus, arranger(s)
Prelude, Op. 28, No. 15, "Raindrop"
11. Prelude, Op. 28, No. 15, "Raindrop" 00:04:33
Chopin, Fryderyk
Grutzmacher, Leopold, arranger(s)
Nocturne No. 2 in E flat major, Op. 9, No. 2
12. Nocturne No. 2 in E flat major, Op. 9, No. 2 00:04:40
Godard, Benjamin
Jocelyn: Berceuse
13. Jocelyn: Berceuse 00:04:38
Rubinstein, Anton
Popper, David, arranger(s)
Melody in F major, Op. 3, No. 1
14. Melody in F major, Op. 3, No. 1 00:02:46
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Siloti, Alexander, arranger(s)
Toccata in C major, BWV 564: Adagio
15. Toccata in C major, BWV 564: Adagio 00:03:52
Granados, Enrique
Cassado, Gaspar, arranger(s)
Goyescas: Intermezzo
16. Goyescas: Intermezzo 00:04:28
Popper, David
Vito (Spanish Dance, Op. 54, No. 5)
17. Vito (Spanish Dance, Op. 54, No. 5) 00:03:15
Saint-Saens, Camille
Carnival of the Animals: XIII. Le Cygne (The Swan)
18. Carnival of the Animals: XIII. Le Cygne (The Swan) 00:02:44
Bruch, Max
Kol Nidrei
19. Kol Nidrei 00:08:57
Total Playing Time: 01:13:58
