Trois Petites Pièces pour piano (Nadia Boulanger) - Antonio Oyarzábal, piano

Juliette Nadia Boulanger (1887 – 1979) was a French music teacher and conductor. She taught many of the leading composers and musicians of the 20th century, and also performed occasionally as a pianist and organist. From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Conservatoire de Paris but, believing that she had no particular talent as a composer, she gave up writing music and became a teacher. In that capacity, she influenced generations of young composers, especially those from the United States and other English-speaking countries. Among her students were many important composers, soloists, arrangers, and conductors, including Grażyna Bacewicz, Daniel Barenboim, Lennox Berkeley, İdil Biret, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, John Eliot Gardiner, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Quincy Jones, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Astor Piazzolla, Virgil Thomson, and George Walker. “Like other works by Nadia Boulanger, these Little Piano Pieces had remained unpublished, the musician having wished to publish only some of her compositions. The manuscripts of these three pieces are preserved in the Nadia Boulanger Collection in the music department at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. However, several clues prove that she had planned on composing others, since an unfinished manuscript is to be found at the Médiathèque Nadia Boulanger of the National Conservatory in Lyon, and SACEM has the declaration bulletins for two other pieces filed by the composer. The three manuscripts bear classification marks allocated at the Collection's entry in 1980. But the order differs from that used for the edition, in which the piece signed and dated after the last bar is placed at the end, allowing for an alternation of keys (D minor - B minor – D minor) and tempi (fast - slow - fast). Moreover, the first piece was given a da capo, as Nadia Boulanger had wished, without, for all that, writing it out in full. Studded with chromatic elements and some dissonance, these brief pieces have no inter- pretation markings: everything leads to believe that it was a first draft to which the composer never came back. Shortly before, she had written the last of the Three Pieces for Cello and Piano the brilliant one in C sharp minor in a fast tempo. She then joined her sister Lili, who was a resident at the Villa Médicis, having won the Premier Grand Prix de Rome for musical composition. For Lili, this was a particularly happy time, and that can be sensed in her music. The composition of four piano works D'un vieux jardin (finished on 3 June 1914), Cortège - (4-5 June), Thème et variations (12 June) and D'un jardin clair (19 June) - is exactly contemporary with Nadia Boulanger's Petites pieces pour piano, dated 5 June 1914. Joined by profound affection, the two sisters thus shared the intimacy of the creative act in the warm atmosphere of the Italian springtime. Such biographical elements shed particular light on these closely related works.” Alexandra LAEDERICH A Pixaudio Production Antonio Oyarzábal - Piano (www.antonioyarzabal.com) Visual - Leonardo González-Alcalá Sound Engineering and Music Production - Ignacio Lusardi Monteverde