Day Two: Concert Wolfgang Lendle
The evening concert for the friday would be a joint venture, Wolfgang Lendle before the break, the Microband next.
Before the performances, the jury of the competition had some announcements. Yves Storms, the chairman of the jury came up with the results of the preliminaries and the drawing of the lots for the finals. The finalists were Erik Pronk (quite a surprise for me), Floria Nica, Ivan Petricevic and Oman Kaminsky Lara (a bit less of a surprise, but still one).
The lots were drawn from the high hat: Erik Pronk would start, followed by Sabrina Vlaskalic, Floria Nica and after the break Ivan Petricevic and Oman Kaminsky Lara.
Now this suspense was lifted, it was time for the music!
The guitarist, composer and educator Wolfgang Lendle plays his role in the classical guitar scene from the end of the sixties (the time I first started to listen to songs on the radio). He is well-known for his original selection of repertoire for concerts.
This time he subdivided his programme in three parts. The first section was dedicated to Baroque composers, the second section consisted of his own composition after ideas from Mozart, Von Glück and Soler -a kind of retrospective of the classical period- and the final section paid attention to the work of the Spanish composers Albeniz en Esquembre.
Ludovico Roncalli (1654-1713) composed the first piece, the Passacaglia. Lendle performed it extensively ornamented, with numerous complex thrills.
I suspected the next piece to be Folias by Gaspar Sanz, but soon it showed that this piece lasted much longer than the two pages of Sanz' version. It was the work of Francisco Guerau (1649-1717) indeed. The theme of La Folia -Folies d' Espagne- remained popular in the classical period and even Mantovani used its chord pattern in one of his easy listening classics. Wolfgang Lendle kept himself to the Baroque playing style and ornamented the variations in an original way.
Tombeau sur le Mort de Monsieur Comte de Logy was the emotional musical epitaph by Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687 - 1750) for the Bohemian lutenist/composer Jan Antonín Losy (1643 - 1721). Wolfgang Lendle played the melancholic piece with the grandeur which Weiss must have had in mind.
Lendle remained in the (quasi-) Baroque era with a pasticcio by Manuel Ponce (1882 -1948), which strongly resembled a composition by Silvius Leopold Weiss. It really sounded like Weiss!
A pasticcio, what's that? It is a pastry indeed, but is also an opera form in which various pieces by multiple composers were merged into a kind of potpourri. Ponce did this with the quasi-Weiss suite.
The last part of the first section was a Fandango by Santiago de Murcia (he lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, but the historians have not been able to find accurate data), one of the last guitar composers before the decline of the Baroque guitar in Spain. Lendle emphasized the folk character of this dance almost perfectly, again extensively ornamented.
The second part brought a contemporary composition by Wolfgang Lendle himself, -e si balla il Fandango- a strongly atonal work, based on fragments by Mozart, Von Glück and Antonio Soler. Normally contemporary music does not fascinate me, but Lendle's performance was interesting to me. This was caused by the continuous suspense between the tonal and atonal. The atonal sections showed an illusion towards the tonal, which was broken down mercilessly time and time again. The atonal chaos nibbled on the few seemingly melodic passages like the flood tries to devour a dike. A special and very interesting effect.
After the exacting atonality it was time for some breathing with the classical Spanish style. Lendle showed himself a master with his personal and almost raw style with the well-known Asturias and Torre Bermeja by Isaac Albeniz (1860 -1909) and the Cancion Playera by Q. Esquembre (1885 -1965).
He rewarded the enthusiasm of the audience with a small encore by Francisco Guerau which sounded quite familiar to me. I remember that it was on one of my vinyl records. Unfortunately I have sold the vinyl (I got sufficient CDs and MP3s), so I could not check it out.