Recuerdos Musicales

Libby Gardner Series

Sunday, March 8, 2026
3:00PM
Libby Gardner Concert Hall
1375 Presidents' Circle
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112

Spanish, Cuban, and Mexican music by Ponce, Curbelo, Granados, Brouwer, and Cassadó

Program

Manuel Ponce Estrellita for guitar (Arr. Sergio Frias)

Manuel Ponce Intermezzo No. 1 in E minor (Arr. Sergio Frias)

Sergio Frias, guitar

Enrique Granados Selections from 12 Tonadillas

Julia Gershkoff, soprano
Kimi Kawashima, piano

Leo Brouwer Balada de la doncella enamorada

Sergio Frias, guitar
Hugh Palmer, violin
Hannah Linz, violin
Whittney Sjogren, viola
Louis-Philippe Robillard, cello

Elisabet Curbelo Mikrop (2010) for viola and electronics

Brant Bayless, viola

Gaspar Cassadó Piano Trio in C major

Hugh Palmer, violin
Louis-Philippe Robillard, cello
Viktor Valkov, piano

Program Notes

So many of the international musicians who whiled away their interwar years in Paris were quickly assimilated into that creative hothouse. Not Manuel Ponce. He spent long stretches abroad during his professional life, but the Mexican composer, educator and folklorist always found his way home. Rather than defect, Ponce used the Promethean energy of places like France to more deeply commit to the exploration of his roots. He wrote for piano, chamber music ensembles, and orchestra, but his beloved catalogue of solo guitar works is how we remember him best today. Well, that, and Estrellita, of course. Ponce didn’t just adore Mexican folk songs, he wrote them. “Little Star” was composed in the early twentieth century with lyrics about an anguished, unrequited love. It was an instant classic and has been arranged for just about every possible instrumental combination (Jascha Heifetz performed it for the score of the 1939 film They Shall Have Music). We are talking about Manuel Ponce, though, so no version sings more sweetly than the one for guitar. The same might be said for the gorgeous and nostalgic Intermezzo No. 1 in E minor, but whether on guitar or in its original form for piano, there is no wrong answer for this piece. 

Francisco de Goya’s 1775 commission to create tapestries for the Royal Residences in Madrid resulted in a wealth of cultural commentary for art lovers and historians to ponder in the centuries since. Goya’s colorful “cartoons” featured common Spanish people in scenes of play, conflict, love, and nearly every other shade of human experience. Catalan composer Enrique Granados was heavily influenced by Goya’s irreverent tapestries, not to mention the work of the old master more generally. In fact, “influenced” may not be a strong enough term. Granados was, in his own words, “possessed” by the palette of Goya. Granados wrote a very successful piano suite called Goyescas in 1911 and completed an opera of the same name later in 1916. Not to be overlooked in Granados’ Goya canon was the Coleccion de Tonadillas of 1913 which, much like the Madrid tapestries, presented vignettes of daily life as viewed through the prisms of satire and melodrama. It could be said that the Tonadillas were a functional bridge between the piano suite and the opera. Granados said as much himself, but this charming miniature song cycle stands perfectly well on its own. 

Like Ponce, Leo Brouwer’s name has a holy status among classical guitarists today. Brouwer began his journey with the instrument at the age of 12 in his native Cuba and he remained active as a performer until a hand injury slowed him down in the 1980s. As a composer, Brouwer’s career has segmented into phases. What began in his early years with an emphasis on Afro-Cuban folk idioms shifted in the mid-1960s to a period of experimental and abstract techniques. Since 1980, Brouwer has settled into a very personal, modal kind of tonality, but one that still bears the understated markers of his previous fascinations. The guitar suite El Decameron Negro of 1983 dates from Brouwer’s third phase. He based it on a 1910 collection of African folk tales of the same title, compiled and named after Boccacio’s “The Decameron” by a German ethnologist called Leo Frobenius. The third and final movement of Brouwer’s work is Balada de la doncella enamorada or Ballad of the Maiden in Love. This rondo is the longest and most complex of the Decameron pieces and, in another apt link to Ponce, it lends itself nicely to various instrumental combinations.   

Spanish composer and University of Utah Associate Professor Elisabet Curbelo’s work often focuses on “the use of sensors to control electronics with movement” and “extended vocal techniques based on her research of Middle Eastern music and culture.” Mikrop for Viola and Electronics does not feature the voice, but it was composed while Curbelo was in Istanbul in 2010. As she wrote in a brief note for a performance in 2018, “The electronics . . . are designed to follow the performer’s ad libitum tempo. The word mikrop is the Turkish for microbe. It was one of the first words I learned as I was constantly hearing it. It is a cognate and I wondered why people were talking about bacteria so much. I soon learned it is a commonly used cursing word in Turkish.” For what it’s worth, to use “mikrop” in this way as a Turkish speaker usually means you find the subject to be a deceitful, annoying person who spreads misery about them like a disease. A potent insult, to be sure, but the music of Mikrop sounds more biological than social, as if the very building blocks of cellular life are momentarily given a voice we can hear. 

Gaspar Cassadó’s early talents as a cellist required the supervision of none other than his legendary countryman, Pablo Casals. The fact that young Gaspar would need to go to Paris for this was only a momentary obstacle, solved when his home city of Barcelona provided him with a scholarship. The time in France was a boon for Cassadó, and the close connection to Casals certainly didn’t hurt. Until it did. Casals, a staunch anti-fascist, later publicly condemned his student’s willingness to perform for Europe’s most authoritarian regimes. The two men reconciled eventually, but we are left to wonder how much this professional impasse forced Cassadó into obscurity as a composer. The Piano Trio in C Major of 1926 proves just how much we are missing out on when we let ourselves forget a composer like Cassadó. He was a practiced aficionado of the form, having performed in a piano trio with his father and brother prior to World War I. Cassadó’s trio is undeniably “Spanish”, as far as that word goes to describe twentieth century melodic traditions and expectations, and there is a great deal of virtuosity to accompany the stylized flair.   

—Jeff Counts ©2026