Manuel Ponce - Complete Piano Works, Vol. 3 (Álvaro Cendoya)

Information

Composer: Manuel Ponce

• Étude de Moscheles
• Estudios de concierto (Excerpts)
• 20 Piezas fáciles
• Vespertina for Piano
• Mayo
• Mazurka No. 19 in C-Sharp Minor for Piano
• Mazurka No. 23 in A Minor for Piano
• Bersagliera

Álvaro Cendoya, piano

Date: 2022

Label: Grand Piano

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Review

The Mexican Turina? It was a surprise to listen to this album, which I can’t help but recommend as a Melómano de Oro because of its valuable content. Listening to the thirty-three tracks that make up its duration of almost 70 minutes has moved me. For those of us who live with, from and for music, it is not easy to be impressed by what is new just because it is new; on the contrary, we can recognize greatness in the absence of artifice, in the quality of the essential and beautiful message. What beauty in Ponce’s pages! His harmonization, in the ninth of the easy pieces, of the famous Mañanitas, written by his countryman Alfonso Esparza Oteo (a native of Aguascalientes, where he lived since he was a child with his eleven siblings), or the precious and modernist ‘Preludio galante’ of his Estudios de concierto, together with the rest of the works that we can listen to on this disc, the third volume of his integral piano works, show the profound knowledge of the instrument and the excellently informed intuition of the composer and pianist, Manuel María Ponce, who perfected his studies as a performer under the guidance of Martin Krause, a disciple of Franz Liszt.

Ponce’s work, like that of Turina, Albéniz, Falla or Granados, should not be absent from the teaching guides of any conservatory, Spanish or otherwise. Absolutely contemporary of the Sevillian composer, born in the same 1882 as him (also as Stravinski, in another aesthetic side of the polyhedral modernism) and died a year before don Joaquín (1948), Manuel María Ponce drinks from that super Romanticism that is aligned with Modernism as in Andrés Triapello’s Los nietos del Cid (The grandchildren of the Cid), with a certain wink to fantasy, even circus-like, that could remind us of the seductive Broadway as heir to that Beidermeier, with a level of quality in its elaboration similar to what, in my own hands, I found when recording all of Turina’s work. I don’t know how many volumes Ponce’s piano oeuvre will occupy, but I would love to know it all. Listening with a pianist’s ears, maybe something would be different, but what Álvaro Cendoya does seem to me irreproachable. Bravo!

— Antonio Soria

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Manuel Ponce (8 December 1882 – 24 April 1948) was a Mexican composer. After early studies in Mexico, he trained in Italy and Germany before returning to teach at the National Conservatory. Ponce bridged classical music with Mexican folk traditions, promoting national identity through works that blended popular melodies and classical forms. His 1912 piece Estrellita became an international success, helping earn him the title "Creator of the Modern Mexican Song". He also made major contributions to guitar repertoire, notably with Variations and Fugue on La Folia and Sonatina Meridional.

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Álvaro Cendoya (born 1960 in San Sebastián), the son of a Basque father and an Iranian mother, is a Spanish pianist. He began his studies locally before continuing in Buenos Aires with Bruno Leonardo Gelber and later in London with Peter Feuchtwanger. Winner of the prize for best interpretation of Spanish music at the Jaén International Piano Competition (1989), he has performed as soloist with major orchestras and appeared in leading venues such as Geneva's Victoria Hall and London's Wigmore Hall. A Naxos recording artist, he is professor at Musikene and is currently recording the complete piano works of Manuel M. Ponce.

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