Victoria Eli Rodríguez

With a choice of repertoire that represents her both professionally and emotionally, this album is the realisation of a dream for Cuban pianist Iliana Morales. Her career as a performer is built on solid foundations: after graduating from Cuba’s Universidad de las Artes, where she was taught by pianist and academic Frank Fernández, she went on to further studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston, as well as taking masterclasses with such renowned figures as Gabriel Chodos, Misha Dichter, Aquiles delle Vigne and Herbert Stessin (of the Juilliard School, New York). Iliana Morales stands out among the pianists of her generation for her sheer versatility – a recitalist and orchestral soloist, she also plays with a variety of chamber ensembles and teaches at conservatories in Cuba, Mexico and Spain.

For this recording she has made a personal selection from the vast solo piano repertoire of Europe and the Americas. Together, these works by Chopin, Gershwin, Ginastera and Schumann provide the listener with an artistic offering full of depth and lyricism, to which Morales brings virtuosity, introspection and interpretative energy – qualities that create a balance between the many contrasting and nuanced elements of this album, evocatively entitled Elegy for a dream.

With the Sonata No.2 in B flat minor, op.35 by Frédéric Chopin (Warsaw, 1810– Paris, 1849) and Kinderszenen, op.15 by Robert Schumann (Zwickau, 1810–Bonn, 1856), she makes the diversity of the nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic her own. Both works are concert-hall favourites and cornerstones of the pianistic canon. It is, without question, a genuine challenge to compare interpretations, and yet Iliana Morales succeeds in putting her own stamp on both works, in a blend of the vigour and energy, the intimacy and melancholy, that Chopin and Schumann attempted to capture in their scores.

The fact that these universally acknowledged masterpieces are such touchstones of the piano repertoire means that today’s performers have to demonstrate an even greater talent for conveying images and provoking cognition and emotion. While the basic rules of musical notation have to be respected, the enduring popularity of these works calls for performers to rethink their interpretations for the modern day and to expand their pianistic technique.

Various different aspects of Chopin’s compositional and expressive thinking can be seen in his Sonata No.2, with its unconventional use of form, virtuosic figuration and melodic lyricism, as well as its contrapuntal textures and its original harmonic structure, strengthened and enriched by an increase in density and by the use of chromatic elaborations and adventurous harmonic connections. The Funeral March, composed in 1837, is the poetic heart of the Sonata: Chopin added the remaining three movements to it two years later.

The Second Sonata is far from being a model of form. Its macro-structural coherence becomes perceptible not from formal analysis but by considering the introspective nature of the Romantic artist – Chopin breaks away from traditional schemes and incorporates expressive moments of contrasting character into his work, without damaging its oft-cited underlying coherence. Performers must therefore immerse themselves in an almost programmatic process of artistic imagination and conceptualisation, one in which a constant dialogue is established between the brilliant style of, for example, the climactic passages of the Finale, and the melodic lyricism of the second theme of the first movement, Grave – Doppio movimento.

The Three Preludes by George Gershwin (New York, 1898–Hollywood, 1937) provide a stark musical-dramatic contrast with Chopin’s Second Sonata. With this change in aesthetic and style, we come to twentieth-century modernity and the compositional modernism imprinted on these works by folk music and jazz. The experience Gershwin gained as a pianist and Broadway songwriter during the tempestuous early decades of the 20th century brought him fame in the concert hall and in the theatre world as well as, later, in Hollywood. In 1924, the premiere and ensuing success of Rhapsody in Blue for piano and orchestra established him in a compositional sphere that had permeable boundaries, allowing popular and classical to intermingle – a space that was also home to the Three Preludes, first performed in 1926.

While Gershwin’s music, nurtured in the field of songwriting, was based on his mastery of melody, his harmonic writing too became increasingly adventurous, with forays into remote modal territories, and he explored both strictness and flexibility in his rhythmic writing, which was often dominated by syncopation. The jazz-oriented melodic, rhythmic and harmonic materials used in these three preludes are hallmarks of the nascent “American” style in classical music.

There are clear contrasts within the cycle, requiring the pianist to master a range of different virtuosic techniques. In the first and third pieces in particular, the rhythm is the driving force, while the bluesy melody of the second has the gently rocking feel of a lullaby. The “Spanish” epithet given by Gershwin to the third prelude seems to be an allusion to some generic idea of Spanish music – the kind of stereotypical image perpetuated at the time by the US music industry.

Alberto Ginastera’s Rondó sobre temas infantiles populares argentinos, op.19 is a work of great technical and interpretative complexity, and was in no way conceived as a piece for children to play. These folk-based children’s tunes become an excellent means for Ginastera (Buenos Aires 1916–Geneva, 1983) to continue along the radical route that his work had gradually begun to take from the early 1940s onwards. Chronologically speaking, the Rondó (1947) comes soon after the Doce preludios americanos, op.12 (1944) and the Suite de danzas criollas, op.15 (1946), but here the “Argentine character” of the music takes on a new appearance: there are greater tensions in the rhythmic-melodic texture, percussive effects, irregular groupings, little ostinatos and more profound, sometimes unpredictable, harmonic structures, in which Ginastera amuses himself by taking modal liberties. This is a work that points to his commitment to the avant-garde while still making direct use of Argentine folk elements.

It is worth noting here just how carefully Iliana Morales has designed the programme for this album – not only does this central nucleus of American works of different aesthetics add interest to the recording as a whole, it also reveals the many different expressive facets of her playing.

Rounding off the album is Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from childhood), a set of thirteen miniatures written in 1838. Discovery, curiosity, surprise, openness, joy and sorrow, among other childhood emotions and experiences, all find a place in this collection. At its heart is Traümerei, one of the composer’s best-known and most widely played works.

 Kinderszenen’s short pieces are not intended for children to play but form a continuous narrative of “the reflections of an adult for other adults”, as Schumann wrote in a letter of 1848 to composer, pianist and conductor Carl Reinecke. So well was the cycle received and such was the income achieved from sales of the score that it became more or less what we would think of today as a commercial success. Kinderszenen remains a staple of the solo piano repertoire, but its pieces are far from easy to play: they require the pianist to recall his or her own experiences of childhood in order to seek out the necessary range of colours and nuances.

There is a clear synthesis between music and poetry in Kinderszenen. The cycle constitutes a subtle act of symbiosis in which, although there is no explicit poetic text, the content and its significance become clear from the relationships between the structural components and the music’s ability to convey semantic meaning. It is an act not of translation but of persuasion, which is worked upon the listener by the performance, conjuring memories of our childhood days and a world of the imagination.

Elegy for a dream is a feat of interpretative creation with which Iliana Morales succeeds in bringing the immediacy of live performance to the personal, private listening experience, with all the added intimacy and subtlety enabled by the recording process.