Beyond Flamenco
PERFORMING ARTS
Tuesday, November 21, 2006; Page C04
Post-Classical Ensemble
Always venturing into new cultural territory, the Post-Classical Ensemble gave three intriguing concerts at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Sunday, the day's extravaganza based on the theme "Beyond Flamenco: Finding Spain in Music." In defining the role of flamenco styles in early 20th-century Spanish music, the Ensemble spotlighted works by two leading Spanish composers, Isaac Albéniz and Manuel de Falla. The group's multimedia spectacle combined folk-inspired Spanish classical music with film, poetry readings, paintings and panel discussions.
Pianist Pedro Carboné opened the concerts with pieces from Albéniz's nearly unplayable "Iberia" (1908), which conjures up mostly Andalusian styles. Scaling the score's extraordinary technical demands, Carboné bolted up and down the keyboard with hand-crossings at NASCAR speeds, imaginatively outlining the music's complex rhythmic folk idioms, densely tangled impressionist textures, clustered dissonances and Moorish-inspired melodies.
Devoted to the "Europeanization of Spanish Culture," the day's second session included a recording of "Iberia" arranged for orchestra; a jazz pianist's 2005 version of it filmed by Carlos Saura; a lecture by José Maria Naharro-Calderón concerning the stereotypical image of Spain as dark, exotic and provincial as expressed in 19th- and 20th-century Spanish paintings; and an excellent performance of Joaquín Turina's "La Oración del Torero" for string quartet.
Again tackling the keyboard with fire and ice, Carboné began the third concert with two works by De Falla composed during his "flamenco" period: the "Ritual Fire Dance" and the "Fantasia Baetica." Both are high-impact challenges loaded with multiple trills and tremolos that Carboné took on with titanic, even heroic, bursts of energy. Conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez, Carboné and the Ensemble topped things with a brilliant excursion into De Falla's Concerto for Keyboard and Five Instruments, a work of stringent beauty.
— Cecelia Porter
