 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Cover
Story
Photo by Marina Chavez.
Gypsy Journey Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg finds a new voice with the Assad guitar duo by John Lehmann-Haupt A violin—guitars—Gypsies. The words evoke the names of the French violinist Stéphane Grappelli and the Belgian Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, and the exuberantly virtuosic swing of their marvelous 1930s Hot Club of France recordings. But that is just one thread in the rich musical tapestry of Gypsy music; over their centuries of wandering, the Gypsies have taken up the music of their adopted lands everywhere, infusing each idiom with their own exotic accents. It is this broader tradition that is mined to stunning effect on a new CD entitled simply Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Sérgio and Odair Assad (Nonesuch 79505-2), a set of fantasias on Gypsy themes for violin and two guitars. It’s new territory for the 1999 Avery Fisher Prize–winning Salerno-Sonnenberg, but that’s perhaps to be expected from a violinist known as much for her risk-taking and flamboyance as for her formidable talent. After all, her recent release Humoresque (Nonesuch 79464), which recreates the soundtrack of the 1947 film of the same name, has her flanking the Presto from Bach’s unaccompanied G-Minor Sonata with a lushly emotive rendition of Geshwin’s "Embraceable You" on one side, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s manic The Flight of the Bumblebee on the other. For this new disc, Sérgio Assad, the composing/arranging half of the renowned Assad brothers guitar duo, has treated traditional material with sophisticated compositional techniques to create a program of great expressive range. There are selections based on songs from throughout Eastern Europe, as well as Turkey, Russia, and Spain. And in tribute to Grappelli and Reinhardt, there’s a version of Reinhardt’s signature song "Nuages" that manages to be both a deconstruction and a lyrical outpouring that expresses the spirit of the original beautifully. As important as repertoire are the voices that give it life. This recording marks the first collaboration of these players, whose temperaments are at once congruent and contrasting. There’s Salerno-Sonnenberg, on the one hand, with her noted outspokenness and pedal-to-the-metal intensity of both interpretation and stage manner. And then there are the Assads, with a characteristic Brazilian ease of manner that belies their extraordinarily precise ensemble and fleet passagework. As it turns out, the three were mutual admirers from afar long before they recorded this disc. "My producer, Karen Chester, said, ‘You should really go hear these guys play,’" Salerno-Sonnenberg tells me when I meet with her and Sérgio Assad on a January afternoon in her New York apartment. (Odair Assad, it seems, is the silent partner of the duo, leaving all publicity duties to his older brother.) "It was back in ’95, I think. So I went to hear them and was just blown away. I fell in love with them. I’ve heard guitar soloists, but I’ve never heard anything remotely like these two—they breathe together!" Assad had a similar experience. "We have a friend who lives in Seattle who showed us her records and said, ‘You should play with her, because she’s so great,’" he recalls. "I’m talking about back in ’94, maybe. And it happened. It just happened. It was the craziest thing." "I had just signed a contract with Nonesuch," adds Salerno-Sonnenberg, "and [Chester] knew that these guys recorded for [the label] as well. It’s a big family at Nonesuch." But it took a little more serendipity for the Gypsy project to come together. "The idea of the collaboration was [Nonesuch executive producer] Bob Hurwitz’ idea," says Assad. "We had a meeting about three years ago. The first idea was to do a Baroque recording. But if you do a Baroque recording, it’s just going to be another Baroque recording." Then Assad saw the 1994 film Latcho Drom at a friend’s house. Directed by Tony Gatlif, the movie opens with a young Gypsy boy in India singing plaintively while accompanying himself on hand-held percussion sticks. A series of performances of great intensity, each set in a different country, eloquently documents the Gypsy migration. "I thought the story was so beautiful, but I knew nothing about Gypsies at all. I knew a little about flamenco guitar; some of the manouche guitar [the Reinhardt style], that I knew. But I saw the movie and said, ‘Maybe this would be a cool idea.’ "So I remember coming here and I brought up the idea, and Nadja made a joke: ‘Oh, but who’s going to write the music?’ I said, ‘I can try,’ and she said, ‘Oh, you’re going to be Bela Assad!’" "But that’s what he did," declares Salerno-Sonnenberg. "He collected folklore, songs." "I went home to Brussels to do research," Assad continues. "I read some books, the story of the Gypsies in the Balkans. I heard a lot of music. Now you can find a lot of Gypsy recordings, [with the current interest in] world music. But three years ago it was much more difficult to find. "Still, I found a lot of Hungarian bands, because they had been recorded for many years. I found a group called Bratsch, another called Musikas, and also Taraf de Haidouks [from Romania]. I went to a library in Brussels and found a lot of recordings made by musicologists." "Basically, he traced the routes of the Gypsies in Eastern Europe," interpolates Salerno-Sonnenberg. Although the circumstances surrounding their emergence as a distinct group remain a mystery, it is known that the Gypsies originated in northwest India, leaving for Persia about a thousand years ago. The name Gypsy derives from the misapprehension, at the time of their appearance in Europe in about the 15th century, that the people were of Egyptian descent. "The music on the album is all based on traditional tunes, except for ‘Nuages,’" Salerno-Sonnenberg explains. "Sérgio had to take something very simple—a simple tune, a folklore tune—and build it into something really complex, and also very sensual." Although the guitar does have a presence in Gypsy music, particularly in the French manouche style, the instrument is usually strung with heavy-gauge steel strings and played with a pick, with a lot of forceful down-stroke emphasis. This helps it hold its own among violins and other instruments better than the lighter nylon-strung classical version played by the Assads. "The combination of the violin and two guitars is not as natural and easy as maybe you would think," says Salerno-Sonnenberg. "The violin can blow away a guitar. But my take was that I didn’t want just to be accompanied. I would tell him, ‘Sérgio, please don’t write a violin concerto [in which] you’re accompanying me!’ The violin, by virtue of its nature, has a lot of the themes. But my concern was equality, and I think it really shows in the record. "To play the extremely hard stuff that he wrote on one hair so you’re not covering the guitars up is really very difficult. I can count maybe four or five times in the record where I’m playing full out. In a performance, they are miked and I’m not. In the recording, there’s not one person that you hear more than another, and that is a credit to the producer." Since flamenco is arguably the best-known form of Gypsy-influenced music, "Andalucia" makes a fitting opening to the disc. Like several of the program’s selections, it comprises several clearly delineated sections. The guitars open with an energetically syncopated perpetuum mobilé figuration in the treble, with chromatically shifting modal accents supporting the darting entrances of the violin. Fragments of the theme emerge; it is "Los Quatro Muleros," a well-known traditional Spanish song that sounds as if it may well also have inspired the last movement of Joaquín Rodrigo’s famous Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra. A move into sunnier harmonic territory leads into a sequence of washy guitar arpeggios and harmonics, over which legato violin lines lead into a rapid pianissimo obbligato figure. A guitar restates the theme, and we are thrown into the midst of a vigorous bulerias, with rapid-fire added percussion marking the dance form’s rhythm. The theme returns, and whole-tone passages bring us to a bright, triadic close. "The first time I heard ‘Los Quatro Muleros’ was many years back, played by Paco de Lucia on one of his first recordings," explains Assad. "Actually, we did copy his arrangement in performance in those days. It was very simple, but I always liked the melody so much. Then when the idea came to do this, I said, ‘Well, if I’ve got to do something that’s going to sound like flamenco, I’ve got to use that same theme. But I wouldn’t do it the way he did.’ So I mixed in a lot of other things—some Ravel, for one! "But," laughs Assad, "I think the whole song is an excuse to play the bulerias. It’s the part that we like to do, right?" Salerno-Sonnenberg joins in his laughter. "I tried to use the most different approach I could for each piece, so they would really sound different," he continues. "I used the traditional elements that I could find, but when I started to do the composition, I would choose some elements to make them formally different, one compared to another. In the ‘Turkish Dance,’ for instance, I used some more modern language." At more than nine minutes long, Istanbul: Awakening and Turkish Dance is the disc’s longest selection, and it evokes a whole world. "Awakening" is sounded by the violin alone, in a four-minute cadenza that explores its modal theme with soaring phrases and double-stopped passages. Percussive effects and muted guitar passages strummed in flamenco rasgueado fashion kick off the dance. About a minute later, the home tonality of the piece drops a fifth, a simple, powerful move that lands us on a new level. Whole-tone passages lead to a section of marked chromaticism with an almost tone-row quality. The piece ends in a burst of rhythmic energy. Assad explains the relationship of the piece’s midsection to its opening. "It’s very chromatic, but it recalls what [the violin] did in the cadenza. It’s exactly the same thing, harmonized very chromatically. And the last section is exactly the same phrase, double speed." Performer-composers are less the norm today than in centuries past, and the Assads’ remarkably fluent instrumental technique has perhaps stolen some of the limelight from Sérgio’s compositional accomplishments as the duo’s career has blossomed over the past two decades. Although he was a conducting major at the University of Rio de Janeiro, Sérgio’s formal study of composition actually consisted of only a brief series of private lessons with Esther Scliar, whom he describes as a "sort of Nadia Boulanger figure." Salerno-Sonnenberg comments, "His approach—and Odair’s even more—is so laid back and relaxed that you [ask], ‘Where did you learn how to compose?’ and it’s, ‘Well, you know, I just do it.’ They’re so full of talent that it just comes out of them!" In fact, the cadenza of Istanbul unfolds with a spontaneity that sounds as if it could be at least in part improvisational. But, says Salerno-Sonnenberg, Sérgio Assad wrote every note. "I have tried and continue to try to improvise," she explains. "It’s an unbelievable art form—one that I cannot do. There are classical artists who think they can just go and play jazz. They make recordings, and they have no right to do it. "I have locked myself in this very room with a big bottle of whiskey and smokes, and even my cat can’t come in, and I played, over and over, the same tune. I think if I had to, I could improvise, but I certainly am not even good at it, let alone a master. But I can play around with stuff on the page." "Nuages" opens with watery-sounding guitar arpeggios and chords in harmonics under violin pizzicato notes, which suggest raindrops falling from the clouds of the French title. Fragments of the main theme emerge, divided among the instruments. After close to five minutes of development, the floodgates open and the tune finally sings out on the violin, with all the unabashed romanticism of the Reinhardt-Grappelli original, coming to rest on a warm, Djangoesque G6 chord. It’s a treatment reminiscent of Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal, written for guitarist Julian Bream in 1963, a sort of theme and variations in reverse in which some 18 minutes of angular and often dissonant explorations of Elizabethan lutenist John Dowland’s "Come, Heavy Sleep" finally resolve into a single chorus of the song itself, achingly lovely in its purity. "I can’t lie and say that I was not thinking of that," says Assad, chuckling. "I always thought that the idea of doing variations and putting the song at the end was a great thing, because the song comes out so beautifully." "And as far as playing it goes, it’s the reward, too," adds Salerno-Sonnenberg, "because it’s very difficult technically, for all of us. Imagine trying to sound like a cloud!" The opening section of "Nuages" fluctuates between the keys of G and A. "I wanted just to do different kinds of clouds," explains Assad. "Quiet clouds, stormy clouds. . . . In spite of the fact that Django was Belgian, the manouche side of the Gypsies is considered French. And because I was doing something French, I thought of doing Impressionistic. Again, you have Debussy, Ravel in ‘Nuages.’" Aside from that piece, the disc’s only widely known song is the Russian Gypsy tune that is the basis for Fantasy on "Dark Eyes." It has a haunting sadness that is very similar to that of some of the traditional minor-key Jewish melodies, which should come as no surprise when one considers the ostracism and persecution that both Gypsies and Jews have endured through the centuries. But there are important differences between the two groups. For one, while the Jews have traditionally had their religion as a powerful cultural bond, the Gypsies have assimilated fairly readily into the religions of their host countries; there are Catholic Gypsies, Islamic Gypsies, and so forth. One might wonder, then, what is at the core of their cohesion. "They have an amazing ability to adapt," says Salerno-Sonnenberg, "but there is something that holds them together. I don’t know what it is, but it could be freedom. It’s like what somebody once said to me about the opera Carmen: that the thing that drives her, that compels her, is sex. And I said, ‘You know, I don’t think so. I think it’s freedom. It’s the freedom to do and be whatever you want whenever you want, including saying, I don’t want you anymore, I want you. And I don’t want to live in this country anymore, I’m going to go here. If you kick me out here, I’m going to go here. I’m going to adapt, I’m going to be fine.’" The vitality of Gypsy music is also connected to their nomadic ways. "It comes from their style of living," declares Salerno-Sonnenberg. "If you’re living not in the city, not in Budapest or anywhere, you’re outside, you’re on the outskirts—what do you do at night? Well, you sit around the fire [and sing and play]. It’s an incredible, strong feeling for the soul of music that they have." There is a pianissimo violin passage in the "Dark Eyes" fantasy in which the slight roughness of the slow-moving bow on string actually becomes part of the phrase’s expression. It’s a sound I suspect most violinists would try to avoid, and yet it yields a sort of breathy utterance that is very beautiful. I have heard it in other recordings of Salerno-Sonnenberg’s, but never from any other violinist. "I have never heard anyone else use it," she agrees. "The violin is an instrument that can create a billion different sounds. I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t use them all. But that’s not how we’re taught. Between my training at Curtis Institute, which was a very Galamian, pedagogical kind, and DeLay at Juilliard—methods, methods, methods!" she cries, rapping the table for emphasis. "Although DeLay was more psychologically smart about her students in that [she understood that] each student should be approached in a different way. But you will never hear another DeLay student play with these kinds of sounds. It was always my battle with her. "I have always wanted to use and implement the sounds the violin can create, and every single piece of music can give you a great gamut of sounds and emotions. And this kind of music—I don’t see why the sound has to be always so focused. There are violinists who think that if you’re playing on the G string, it’s got to be like this," she says, smacking her fist into her palm. "But, you know, what are you playing on the G string?" Her rhetorical question underlines her conviction that tone should always serve the expressive idea, and never be an end unto itself. "Dark Eyes" came very close to being the album’s title, and it’s also the rationale for the CD sleeve photo, which features the three players’ faces against a black background, dramatically top-lit, with eyes aligned. "It’s very commonplace to take the name of the album from one track," says Salerno-Sonnenberg. "But [Nonesuch’s Hurwitz] said that any guitarists and violinist can make an album called Dark Eyes, but nobody else can make an album that’s called Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Sérgio and Odair Assad. He was very much against having a [song] title for this album because it’s unique, not the traditional kind of Gypsy music that you hear in a Hungarian restaurant. I don’t know how that’s going to work as far as marketing it goes, but it is a wonderful idea by itself." However the marketing works, the three musicians feel that the project has brought them unexpected gifts. For the Assads, there has been a concrete benefit in the area of sound production. "The first rehearsals we had here were challenging," explains Assad, "because we had to find the right volume for us and have the guitars still sound good. It’s true the guitar will never be able to compete with the violin. But in order to keep the energy level, you can’t just play soft and turn on the amplification, because it won’t happen. You gotta play!" he declares, laughing. "So we had to change a little of the technique in order to produce more volume. This for us was very, very good. Since we played with you," he says, addressing Salerno-Sonnenberg, "our concert performance has gotten better." For Salerno-Sonnenberg, the association brought a different challenge. "All I can say is the very first time we sat down to play, I was so nervous about somehow fitting in with these two guys that I thought were so great. When you hear them play—I can’t stress this enough—there is something innate in the two of them that [means that] anybody else who comes in is an intrusion. I have a great career and blah, blah, blah—but for me to come in here, that’s different territory. But I was noticing in today’s rehearsal, now we’re so comfortable together, and it was a great feeling. "What they have brought to my playing, even more than I have been trained elsewhere, is to listen. To really listen. It’s not just the notes, it’s not the volume, it’s where they’re going with the phrase. My ears are so sharp when I play with them; they have to be! They have brought that into me. "And then just this whole other style of playing—because everything has Sérgio’s bent, and it’s that Brazilian ‘thing.’ It’s style, and reserve, in a way. If I had to use one word, I would have to say it’s cool. No matter if it’s super-difficult technically—and there are some things that are really super-difficult—or if it’s just a beautiful theme like ‘Dark Eyes’ when it comes in, or the end of ‘Nuages,’ it’s just . . . cool. It’s the coolest stuff I’ve ever done."
|
