PAQUITO D’RIVERA
Born in Havana, 1948
But, Just a Minute?! (2021)
A Farewell Mambo (2013)
Wapango (1997)
Before he became an international legend of Latin jazz, the Cuban saxophonist and bandleader Paquito D’Rivera studied classical clarinet in Havana and played with the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra. While keeping up a performing career that has garnered him five Grammy Awards and another 11 Latin Grammys, he has become increasingly recognized as a composer with a distinct talent for exploring the traditions of his homeland in concert music.
When the Catalyst Quartet commissioned ten (very) short new works in honor of their tenth anniversary—a project they dubbed “CQ Minute”—they included D’Rivera, who reacted cheekily to the specified time limit in his title: But, Just a Minute?! This set also includes A Farewell Mambo, composed in 2013 in memory of a fellow Cuban exile, and using the syncopated rhythms of that Cuban dance style that became an American obsession in the 1940s. D’Rivera arranged a string quartet version of Wapango, his Cuban-tinged interpretation of the Mexican huapango dance from his 1988 Latin jazz album Celebration, demonstrating how there’s never really been any division between the various facets of his all-encompassing musicianship.
ÁSTOR PIAZZOLLA
Born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, 1921
Died in Buenos Aires, 1992
Suite del Ángel (1962)
Born in Argentina, Ástor Piazzolla spent much of his childhood in New York. At age eight he took up the bandoneón, a South American folk instrument in the accordion family, and when he moved back to Buenos Aires as a teenager he played in traditional tango orchestras. Piazzolla went on to win a scholarship to study composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who encouraged Piazzolla to stay true to his tango style. Upon hearing one of his original tangos, she exclaimed, “This is Piazzolla! Don’t ever leave it!”
Piazzolla became the driving force behind a style known as Nuevo Tango, or “New Tango.” Starting in the early 1960s, he formed bands that included electric instruments, and he introduced classical rigor to his tango-flavored compositions. A prime example of that sound can be heard in the incidental music he wrote for a play in 1962, with one more number added three years later to complete this Suite del Ángel, heard here in an arrangement by the Catalyst Quartet.
The suite begins with long lines of melody floating in counterpoint over a steady bass in the Introduction, before the tango pulse heats up midway. Milonga refers to another dance style from Argentina that predated the tango, fueled by a similarly syncopated pulse. Muerte del Ángel begins with a rigorous fugue, showing another side of Piazzolla’s deep affinity for 18th-century styles. Resurrection starts with another interpretation of the Baroque aria with walking bass, and it passes through a range of contrasting passages before arriving at an exciting finish that encapsulates all the excitement and sophistication of Nuevo Tango.
GEORGE GERSHWIN
Born in Brooklyn, 1898
Died in Hollywood, 1937
Lullaby (1919)
George Gershwin was eleven when his family first brought a piano into their apartment. Four years later, after some lessons in classical repertoire including Chopin and Debussy, Gershwin dropped out of high school and found work as a “song plugger” on Tin Pan Alley, New York’s row of music publishing firms. His breakthrough as a songwriter came in 1919, when the influential performer Al Jolson added the song “Swanee” to a revue.
That same year, the 20-year-old composer converted a composition exercise into this Lullaby for string quartet, marking his earliest surviving foray into “serious” composition. Gershwin may have been a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, but he had a keen ear for the subtleties of music rooted in the African diaspora, whether from the American South or Latin America—sounds that were plentiful in the melting pot of New York City. The lilting sway of the Lullaby utilizes the type of syncopations found in ragtime or Cuban dance music.
MAURICE RAVEL
Born in Ciboure, France, 1875
Died in Paris, 1937
String Quartet in F Major (1903)
Maurice Ravel, meticulous yet hot-headed, took after both of his parents, a Swiss engineer and a Basque peasant. Even though he was raised in Paris, Ravel was a perennial outsider who got himself expelled from the Paris Conservatory once as a piano student in 1895, and then again in 1900 after he returned as a composer and wouldn’t follow the rules for writing a proper fugue. His five consecutive rejections in the prestigious Rome Prize competition became something of a public scandal, and even his own teacher, Gabriel Fauré, piled on when he labeled Ravel’s final submission “a failure.” The submitted piece was none other than the String Quartet in F Major, which has long since taken its rightful place as a cornerstone of the quartet repertoire.
One musician who recognized the power of Ravel’s quartet was Debussy, who wrote to his younger colleague, “In the name of the gods of music and in my own, do not touch a single note you have written in your Quartet.” Ravel’s quartet in fact shares many traits with Debussy’s own string quartet from a decade earlier, in the way they both develop thematic connections that link the separate movements.
Ravel’s String Quartet opens with a sweet theme from the first violin, split into two balanced phrases—a promising start for a competition entry. It only takes five measures, though, for the harmonies to abandon the home key, while the telltale melody glides over mystical whole-tone sequences and Eastern-tinged minor modes.
A close kin of the opening melody returns as the basis of the second movement, marked “rather lively, very rhythmic.” The plucking textures and modal harmonies transport this scherzo-like statement to the realm of a Flamenco dance, reflecting Ravel’s fascination with his mother’s native Spain.
The central melody of the “very slow” third movement, introduced by the muted viola, is a drawn-out variant of the same unifying theme. The motive returns yet again as a secondary figure in the finale, but first the quartet presents music that lives up to the “lively and agitated” tempo marking. Having worked through this provocative material, the quartet rises to a bright F-major chord, reaching the conclusive home key in a manner contrary to everything Ravel learned in a classroom.
© 2024 Aaron Grad