On July 31
Panamanian violist Luis Enrique Casal came to the Florida State
University - Panama auditorium and showed a crowd of perhaps
150 people what being a maestro is all about. Accompanied by
pianist Abdiel Lombana, the University of Oklahoma doctoral
candidate and former first violist with Panama’s National
Symphony played a wide range of difficult pieces, establishing
his place among this country’s musical elite.
On this
night’s programs were pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach,
Claude Debussy, George Rochberg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Roque
Cordero, followed by two encores, a romantic piece by Chopin
and a Casal’s interpretation of a traditional Panamanian
tamborito. The night’s second selection, Debussy’s
Pour les Octaves, was Liombana’s piano solo and the first
and last numbers were played by Casal alone.
This reviewer
is a classical music fan, but someone with no formal education
in music. But still, I’ve heard a lot of it and developed
an appreciation for J.S. Bach over the years, and his
compositions will get me in the mood every time. The concert
opened with Casal’s viola adaptation of Bach’s Cello
Suite Number 4. It wasn’t the composer’s most famous
work, and I’m told by musicians that Bach is rarely easy
to play, but it was well played and easily recognizable as the
outstanding baroque composer’s work.
Then Lombana
launched into Debussy, only to encounter a problem pedal. That
gave the audience a pause to see another bit of music mastery,
Professor Lombana getting under the grand piano and fixing the
pedal. “My hero,” Casal said, and Lombana sat back
down and pounded out the complicated and heavily dissonant
piece by the 19th and 20th century French composer.
The first half
of the evening’s schedule concluded with University of
Pennsylvania professor and composer George Rochberg’s 1979
Sonata for Violin and Piano, which began with an allegro
moderato that gave something of the feeling of a 20th century
industrial march, with some string-plucking, dissonance and
rising and falling moods, then continued into a sad adagio
that was something of a viola lament atop a piano dirge, then
brightened up for an epilogue that, however, ended on a sad
note. This is one of Rochberg’s later works from a career
that started with way-out atonal pieces but then embraced the
more traditional canons, as the composer put it, his attempt
“ to reconcile my love for that past and its traditions
with my relationship to the present and its often-destructive
pressures."
After the
intermission Casal and Lombana played Shostakovich’s last
work, the funereal Sonata for Viola and Piano, Opus 147,
written shortly before the Russian composer’s 1975 death.
Did they play this on Soviet TV when Brezhnev, Andropov or
Chernenko died? It’s the sort of thing with which the old
regime observed such occasions, very classically Russian ---
though Shostakovich himself dedicated it to the German composer
Beethoven --- working in some happy Slavic folk themes and
heroic martial and industrial airs into an overall somber
composition. In parts of this Casals was playing tiny strokes,
making his instrument sing ever so beautifully while barely
touching it with the bow.
The final work
on the schedule was the Three Brief Messages for Viola and
Piano, by Roque Cordero, the former director of Panama’s
National Symphony. These were very brief, but very complicated
works. Like parts of the previous Shostakovich opus,
Cordero’s work was composed on a 12-note scale rather than
the usual octave. The first and third messages were, as Casal
put it, examples of “cacophany technique,” while the
middle piece was much more straightforward and kind of
somber.
For a first
encore, we were treated to “something romantic,” a
pretty piece by Chopin that I wasn’t able to identify.
Then, to end
the night, Casal pointed out his aunt in the audience. It was
her 90th birthday, and after a night dominated by mostly
unfamiliar and cerebral music, he said that he wanted to play
“something she would understand.” Befitting our
centennial year, he rounded out the night with a tamborito,
beautifully rendered.
So yes, Panama
does have a worthy classical scene, and right at the top of it
we find Luis Enrique Casal.
Also in this
section:
Cool Internet Sites
Books, The Little Rainbow
Princess
Music, Classical night at
FSU-Panama
