27/01/2023
C&Co New Recording has published on online stream services a collection of music, studies and pieces for children. Here you can find a post about the reasons behind such a publication of the artist Francesco Libetta translated in english.
"We know the great stars of the piano tradition: Tom the cat performing Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody in a tailcoat with Jerry the mouse inside the piano. Benedetti Michelangeli entering the stage pale, Beethoven writing music as a deaf man, Rubinstein telling anecdotes at dinner and Horowitz adjusting his bow tie before playing. Liberace with his gold-plated candelabra, Allevi with his pet shrimp, the skinny Wang, Aunt Martha mesmerizing the audience no matter what he does, and many others. There is something for everyone.
Then there is the army of piano lovers who--as professionals or amateurs--work without being constantly exposed in magazine covers or on recordings. Students of all kinds and all ages, and teachers who may be old girls and old ladies, young men with unlikely looks or anonymous faces, stern imposing figures or frail old men. So many different people spending their time at the piano!
Among the most heroic figures in this world there are for me teachers who take care of the youngest children. A job that like few others relies on an ability to manage the patience that is needed to instill in the very young (born a few years early!) the respect and conviction in studying. To repeat to one student after another the same obvious and profound truths, to cope with random tantrums and to avoid discouragement or suspicious exaltation.
"Setting" a child up properly is, to be frank, a feat. Physically, the piano is played with a bunch of non-intuitive gestures, processed and reconstructed as one does with the tenor voice. And one proceeds to learn them, of course, starting with the most basic gestures, many of them seemingly with little meaning; one goes through combinations at first simple, proceeding to infinite complexities. .. one starts and progresses ... playing what?
I wanted to record a few pages from the children's repertoire as a tribute to the teachers (behind me and in front of me! ... how many of my students are now teachers... Years ago, even those who had begun with teachers who had been my students before them were already beginning to appear among my students...). Even in this cultural universe, the language of music for children must be taken very seriously. A child becomes convinced that music intrigues it, in fact he is so interested in it that he is willing to study piano. Well, at that point what do we make him study? The music he likes, or might like? Or do we put him through an initiation test to assay his steadfastness of purpose and character tetragonaggy (yes, relevant details, but everything has its appropriate time...)?And to better think about it, I found a few examples that I thought were interesting to propose.
When I was a child, my first book was... "The First Book," by Antonio Trombone, a highly esteemed teacher from Palermo, whom I knew as a child: he was on the jury of a competition I partecipated in. " My First Book" contains very simple exercises and a few small Summary Studies. Among them, I recorded the 12 in the third and last part.
Another book by Antonio Trombone that I really enjoyed when I was six years old was " The Harmonious Box." Delightful collection of simple and not so simple pieces, with characteristic titles, and in a world of manner. I included among the recordings of didactic music a collection by Giuliana Marchi, a half-century-old teacher at the Milan Conservatory. "Songs and Dances of Every Country" is a book that succeeds in presenting the child musician with a number of wonderful messages. Spain, Piedmont and Far Wast, Africa and Japan: without musicological pretensions, the art traverses centuries and peoples with all the flavor of popular history (a thought crosses my mind, having recently published the Années de pèlerinage and other music of Liszt: are the themes chosen by Marchi for Venice and Naples an unwitting homage to Liszt?). The best children's book I have ever seen. I'm sorry I didn't think of it in time: I would have tried to get to know the author (she lived her last years in a nursing home in Asiago, and passed away ten years ago) to express all compliments to her for her excellent work.
Although I personally did not happen to study it as a child, I have always heard of the "Beyer," used then and now by numerous teachers. Ferdinand Beyer wrote a collection of 106 Studî (one hundred and six...) publishing it as op. 101 (one hundred and one). On all of Beyer's earlier and later publications an absolute silence has descended for generations. Anyone could reasonably assume that in addition to this one at least 100 others exist (all kidding aside: there are 100 before, and there are 100 after). Once it is admitted that 101 and 106 are blatantly ... Beethovenian (I believe, however, that this is mere coincidence: it was J. S. Bach the one fond of numerical symbology!), we will note that Beyer's book declares itself not a "study tool" but even "preparatory to study." Which study is then intended to be so long, so very long, that it can be appropriately undertaken only after going through the 106 short pieces contained in the collection . Our Beyer conceives a book with very special characteristics: it does not contain music to be listened to, but to be produced. In fact, the composer's intended purpose would not be to enable the performer and/or listener to construct an emotion through a melodic or rhythmic event, so much as to enable those who tackle Op. 101 to practice deciphering the written notation, to learn how to handle the coordination of hand gestures, psychological and physical acts studied in analytical and instructive isolation. Yet ... one should study the musical gesture exactly to associate it with the expressive purpose, the production of a specific "signifying" sound. There is in fact a typical risk that arises when studying the gesture itself too much: the trap of studying the piano like a deaf person learning to speak, without listening to himself. After hundreds of Studies, after repeated recommendations to "not play by ear" (my grandmother used to tell me this, too, when I was six years old), then it turns out that good teachers insist all their lives to use the ear, to play with the ear, for the ear (their own and others'). And--does the child, in all this? enjoy it? Among the tempo indications affixed to the beginning of many of the Exercises, the good Beyer often has us find an encouraging "Allegretto"; and then just as frequently warns of the dangers of any over-eagerness with some "Moderato." The good will is there, the professional ethics synthesize, multiply, sublimate Kant, Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola. It all remains conceptually related to penitential tortures of ancient flavor, as the great Walter Ponce well describes in his recent book "The tyranny of tradition in piano teaching." With one more big question to admit: does tackling such a collection of Exercises at least build discipline to the child?
Of course for an adult [perhaps one who, like me, has already performed/recorded (recte: who continues to perform, as you know) and op. 740 by Carl Czerny and Godowsky's Studî on Chopin, Chopin's originals and Liszt's Transcendentales, since 1992 Ligeti's (I played L'Escalier du Diable a few months after it was composed, in 1993, learning it from a photocopy of the manuscript), since the 1980s other Studies by Liapunoff, Debussy, Scriabin, Cleve, Alkan, Saint-Saëns, Henselt, Thalberg, Rubinstein, and so on... And I also wrote about them] the motivation to tackle and record the 106 Studî op. 101 by Beyer stems from their symbolic potential. I don't know if this is the way to a performative activity that recovers any artistic virtue. Certainly the stunt remains aesthetically significant: trying to make more than a hundred very short Exercises, almost all in C major, palatable. Without bothering Gassman who read the instructions of household appliances and the menus of trattorias, it is the kind of challenge that, in the shadow of the example of the supreme Beethoven writing so many sublime Variations on a Diabellli Waltz (in C Major, too), I have already tried with the Brahms and Hanon Exercises proposed in an online concert for Quinte Parallele . For the usual half-informed person on duty who wants to shout about eccentricity (the last time a concert association secretary thought she was paying me a compliment by qualifying one of my programs as "eccentric," I declined their invitation-and subsequent ones): Beyer counts recordings by Christoph Eschenbach (disseminated by Deutsche Grammophon) and José Orlando Luciano. So interpretive comparisons can also be made. But the present recording has an unsurpassed strength: the three- and four-handed pieces are performed with the man who represents today's Italian answer to Robert Redford: Giorgio Manni (who also tuned the Steinway used), pictured in the photo accompanying the post while intoning a gavel.
Like Antonio Trombone, Francesco Paolo Frontini was also Sicilian. Operist, director of the sumptuous Musical Institute of Catania, he remains famous for his most endearing bazzola: "Il piccolo montanaro." A piece that Aldo Ciccolini as an elder also played as an encore in some concerts. In our case, "Le petit montagnard" (title in French) plays the part of a little gem of the classical children's musical world.
P.S.From the didactic literature for beginners of the instrument we distinguish literature for children (more often "about childhood"). The three Sonatas, Album and Childhood Scenes (recently recorded on an 1860 instrument and published by the Friends of Music of Cagliari in a dvd full of stuff) and Robert Schumann's Woods; Michele Marvulli's Suite (which I recorded a few years ago, and should sooner or later publish, as "approved by the author"-not approved right away, mind you: one piece had to be redone because the velocity was not correct, in another one note didn't fit... But in short, we got there in the end!); Ma mère l'Oye and Dolly, Godowsky's Miniatures and Stravinsky's Cinq pièces faciles".
