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05/02/2025
“Grand Finale: Andrés Segovia Archive”
Alexandre Tansman: Cavatina – Danza Pomposa
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Sonata, opus 77
Hans Haug: Alba
Joan Manén: Fantasia-Sonata
Federico Mompou: Suite Compostelana
Roberto Moronn Pérez (guitar)
Recording: Holy Trinity Church, Weston, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom (October 9‑11, 2023) – 76’
Reference Recordings FR-759 (Distributed by Naxos of America) – Booklet in English
 
Did Andrés Segovia fulfill his goal to commission the first major body of works for the six‑string guitar by a variety of composers? What the Segovia repertoire undoubtedly has in its favor is that in spite of its twentieth-century vintage, it includes no serialism or anything similarly gnarly or strange; Segovia was too much the Romantic to have time for the avant‑garde. But that doesn’t mean the composers he worked with were consistently first‑rate in either their material or how they treated it, and the selections from his repertoire, recorded here by Roberto Moronn Pérez, don’t find it at its best, except perhaps for the two pieces by Alexandre Tansman (1897‑1986). His four‑movement Cavatina has its share of lyrical charm and simplicity of expression, but to really hear the charm, you need to hear Segovia himself play it.
From the perspective of today’s listener and guitarist, Segovia’s style of performance and interpretation is almost as important as a legacy as the many works he commissioned, if only because it has proved less influential than the latter. In this writer’s experience, for instance, one is more likely in concert to hear Torroba’s Sonatina, commissioned by Segovia, than to hear anything played with quite his sense of color and expressive intensity, which involved frequent color contrasts of many gradations, an impetuous (if sometimes sloppy) approach to tempo, and as much vibrato and sliding as possible. His basic idea was to bring out the guitar’s unique expressive qualities, rather than trying to imitate as much as possible the sustain and evenness of a tone a pianist can achieve, but his playing and its sound are also very much of the same world as the bowed-string players of his time in its innocent—in the best sense—Romantic earnestness. However one describes this effect, it helps him to sell the Tansman Cavatina.
For a Segovia tribute album, I can understand Roberto Pérez’s presumed concern: to pay homage to the late master’s style without making a carbon copy. Unfortunately, I don’t find his take on the Segovia style, if that’s what it’s meant to be, a very convincing one. He seems to emulate Segovia most in the frequency and range of color changes, in itself a good thing; and his tone is big and resonant—but also rather glassy, as opposed to Segovia’s warmth. The phrasing also often feels vertical rather than horizontal, a common if not inevitable consequence of the modern disdain for portamento, and this can make all the color changes seem calculated: in Segovia’s hands, these tended to follow the expressive contours of the line, and there’s simply not as much sense of a line here.
Tansman’s Danza Pomposa probably comes off best under Pérez; its more contrapuntal character responds well to the vertical phrasing. The works that make up the rest of the program have their moments, even if nothing lingers in the memory, and such music all the more needs something like the Segovia touch to engage the listener. (I say this with some apology to Castelnuovo-Tedesco, whose best writing for guitar I think is not represented here.) Although I enjoy the last two movements of Mompou’s Suite Compostelana, the first four seem dreary enough, to me, that even Segovia himself can’t enliven them more than Pérez does, so there I can call it a wash.
On the whole, however, this release brings more to admire than to enjoy in terms of performance while seeming insubstantial in terms of repertoire. Maybe an interpretative carbon copy of Segovia wouldn’t be so bad after all—and Julian Bream showed long ago how the essential aspects of Segovia’s playing could be absorbed and projected by an independent musical personality.
Samuel Wigutow
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