ANTONIO MENESES – MONICA CATTAROSSI
CHIGIANA DIGITAL CONCERTS ON DEMAND
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NATUREZA with ANTONIO MENESES and MONICA CATTAROSSI
CONCERT
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Eisenach, Turingia 1685 – Leipzig 1750
SONATA FOR VIOLA DA GAMBA AND HARPSICHORD
n. 3 in G minor BWV 1029
Vivace
Adagio
Allegro
MARCO PADILHA
Campinas, Brazil 1955
Portrait I “Physis”
(Inspired by Nature as the principle that generates everything) “movement and transformation that is born and develops” dedicated to Antonio Meneses world premiere
LEÓS JANÀCEK
Hukvaldy, Czech Republic 1854 – Ostrava 1928
Pohádka
Con moto.
Andante.
Allegro Con moto.
Adagio poco rubato Allegro
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS
Rio de Janeiro 1887 – 1959
SONATA FOR CELLO AND PIANO
n. 2 op. 66
Allegro moderato
Allegro cantabile Scherzo.
Allegro scherzando
Allegro vivace sostenuto
ENCORE
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS
O canto do cisne negro
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS
Paris 1835 – Algiers 1921
from Le Carnaval des animaux
Le Cygne
Interpreters
ANTONIO MENESES cello
MONICA CATTAROSSI piano
Chigiana International Festival & Summer Academy 2019 “Out of Nature”
Live recording, Palazzo Chigi Saracini, Siena, 12 July 2019.
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The fifth edition of the Chigiana International Festival & Summer Academy 2019 entitled Out of Nature revolves around the conceptual reflection and sound of Nature. This year Greta Thunberg was elected “Person of the Year” appearing on magazine covers and newspapers around the world. The themes of ecology and the protection of the planet are crossing all territories of human thought, from philosophy to politics, and from education to religion. The world of music also reflects and cultivates a response to the challenges of acoustic ecology and the soundscape. Natureza, created by the performers Antonio Meneses on the cello and Monica Cattarossi on the piano, is a concert that combines human nature with a musical nature, the vital and generative nature to the fantastic nature of the story, ending with a tribute to the animal world – all transfigured, transposed, translated into the sound language of music. Man and his rational and creative force, who meditates on his own identity beginning from the senses, opens and concludes the program of Natureza with Bach and Villa Lobos.
Composed during his years in service at the court of Köthen (1717-23), where prince Leopold, passionate about music, played the viola da gamba, the three Sonatas are the final masterpieces for this glorious instrument, which was beginning to yield to the more recent cello. The famous Suites that Bach dedicated to this medium date back to the same period. Unlike the repertoire of French authors, which focuses on embellishment and virtuosity, Bach’s writing for viola da gamba is more markedly contrapuntal, with three voices, in which the first voice is entrusted to the right hand of the harpsichord, the viola da gamba performs the second voice, while the basso is performed by the harpsichordist’s left hand.
Heitor Villa-Lobos, a Brazilian composer, arriving later in the twentieth century, is inserted between these two worlds and ways of writing, the German and French. He was a cellist by training and active in Parisian musical life in the 1920s, who made distinct references to Bach’s style in his works. The attentive scholar, Robin Stowell, considers the second Sonata for cello and piano by Villa-Lobos to be a page of considerable importance, for its French influences, writing, “his first two movements seem to sum up Franck and Fauré, while the finale recalls the main theme of the first movement, with the cello decreasing in value accompanied by dry piano chords, imitating a drummer, in the manner of the Debussy Sonata.”
In the two pieces at the center of the concert, the music becomes the vehicle for two different but complementary, ideas: the idea of nature as a generating force and its temporal evolution “que nata e se desenvolve” (“that grows and develops”) described in the piece by Padilha; and the underlying idea in Janàček’s Pohádka, that, even today, the supernatural can explain the events of reality and the natural world.
Considered one of the greatest Brazilian composers of his generation, Padilha completed extensive studies at home, and at the same time inherited part of the great European tradition, studying also with Almeida Prado, himself a pupil of Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. His collaboration with Antonio Meneses has been particularly fruitful, offering him several important commissions, including the intense diptych Invocatio.
Pohádka, in the Czech language, means ‘tale’, but the original title by Janàček refers more accurately to the fairy tale. A first version, from 1910, followed this example more closely, adopting its full title and providing a programmatic guide to the subject that inspired it, the epic poem in verse, The Tale of Tsar Berendej, by the Russian poet Vasilij Andreevič Žukovskij. In the definitive version, dated 1923, Janàček eliminated any programmatic reference, opting instead for the more neutral and allusive title of Tale.
The last variation on the Natureza theme appears in the two pieces proposed as encores, both linked to the figure of the swan, a frequent motif of musical inspiration from the Renaissance to today.
Anna Passarini
English translation by Samantha Stout
Antonio Meneses was born in Recife, Brazil, in 1957, and began his musical studies at the age of ten. At sixteen he met the cellist Antonio Janigro, who invited him to attend the courses he taught in Düsseldorf and Stuttgart. In 1977, Meneses won first prize at the ‘ARD International Competition’ in Munich, and in 1982, he received first prize and a gold medal at the ‘Tchaikovsky Competition’ in Moscow.
He performs with the most renowned orchestras of major cities in Europe, America and Asia, and collaborates with conductors of high caliber, such as Abbado, Albrecht, Blomstedt, Bychkov, Chailly, Davis, Dutoit, Gatti, Järvi, Jansons, von Karajan, Muti, Oue, Previn, Rostropovič, Sanderling, Temirkanov and Thielemann. He is regularly invited to numerous music festivals in Europe and the Americas.
During the period from 1998 to 2008 he was a member of the Beaux Arts Trio, collaborated with the Vermeer Quartet and performed in duo with the pianists Menahem Pressler and Maria João Pires. During the 2019/2020 season he performed in Lisbon and Florence, and toured South America (Brazil and Colombia) and Japan.
Antonio Meneses has recorded a vast and varied repertoire, collaborating with great soloists, accompanists, orchestras and famous directors for numerous record labels.
In addition to concert appointments, he holds masterclasses in Europe, America and Japan. Since 2008, he teaches at the Bern Conservatory, and since 2002 teaches within the Summer Academy at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena.
Monica Cattarossi lives in Milan and works in the field of chamber music and accompaniment, as an interpreter, chamber musician and teacher. She teaches collaborative piano in Lugano, chamber music in Novara, and collaborates with the “Pavia Cello Academy”, the “Walter Stauffer” Academy of Cremona, and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. She accompanies the masterclasses of Italian and foreign artists, and with many of whom she holds countless concerts in duo and chamber music for renowned companies and festivals.
Her competence as a pianist is highly requested on the occasion of various instrumental competitions in Italy and Germany. On the occasion of the Markneukirchen cello competitions, in addition to those in Porec and Zagreb named after Antonio Janigro, she was awarded the diploma of best accompanist.
For a decade Cattarossi was the pianist of the “Giuseppe Verdi” Symphony Orchestra of Mila playing under the baton of conductors such as R. Chailly, W. Marshall and Z. Xian. She has recorded the complete works of Astor Piazzolla with the well-known cellist Enrico Dindo. And, together with the pianist Filippo Farinelli, she has recorded the complete works of André Jolivet for two pianos, for the Brilliant Classics label.
She has held chamber music masterclasses at Sapporo Music University, the Seoul Chamber Orchestra and the Gdansk Academy of Music.
After graduating from the “Benedetto Marcello” Conservatory in Venice, she then specialized with Jacques Rouvier, Konstantin Bogino and Andrea Lucchesini, establishing herself in the international chamber music competitions of Pinerolo and Palmi. She is also a graduate in Musical Philology from the Faculty of Musicology in Cremona.