(Classical, Cello / Виолончель) Cristobal Halffter - Cello Concerto No. 2 & Parafrasis (Mstislav Rostropovich / Мстислав Ростропович) - 1987, APE (image + .cue), lossless

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HALFFTER Christobal / Cello Cto n 2+Parafrasis
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(b Madrid, 24 March 1930). Composer and conductor, nephew of (1) Rodolfo Halffter and (2) Ernesto Halffter. His childhood was spent partly in Germany because of the civil war in Spain. He subsequently studied with Del Campo at the Madrid Conservatory, graduating in 1951 and winning a prize for his Scherzo; he also took private lessons with Tansman. At the beginning of his professional career he worked for a time in Spanish radio, before taking up a chair in composition (1960) at the Madrid Conservatory, of which, in 1964, he became director. He resigned the post two years later in order to concentrate on composing and conducting. He later taught at Darmstadt and served as honorary president of the International Festival of Contemporary Art, Ruyan.
Halffter's early works, such as the Antífona pascual for soloists, choir and orchestra, first performed at the Ateneo (1952), show the clear influence of Falla (especially of the Harpsichord Concerto and El retablo de Maese Pedro) and also of Rodolfo and Ernesto Halffter. At that time Spanish music was considerably out of touch with developments in the rest of Europe. Contemporary scores and writings were hard to find, and the progress of decades had to be made up in a mere matter of years. Gradually Halffter began to explore other paths, approaching first the neo-classicism of Bartók and Stravinsky, then Webern and Schoenberg. His work gained critical esteem and in 1954 he won the National Music Prize for his Piano Concerto, first performed by the National Orchestra under Toldrá. The rigorous Tres piezas for string quartet and Saeta, a simple piece for ballet soon performed in Paris, signal the newly international character of Halffter's work.
During the latter part of the 1950s, Halffter further defined his musical personality with the Misa ducal (1955), commissioned by the Casa de Alba to commemorate the restoration of the Palacio de Liria, and, most important, with Microformas for orchestra (1959–60), a work whose avant-garde credentials were both a shock to its first audience and a provocation for Halffter's contemporaries. As a result of this piece, Halffter was taken on by Universal Edition of Vienna. In the 1960s and early 70s he continued to pursue a modernist path in works such as Líneas y puntos (1967) for wind instruments and tape and Anillos for large orchestra, which both display a confident handling of the complex texture and refined pointillism typical of the period. At the same time Halffter revealed, his social conscience in Yes, speak out, yes (1968), commissioned by the United Nations to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Planto para las víctimas de la violencia (1970), written for the Donaueschingen festival, Requiem por la libertad imaginada (1971) and Gaudium et spes–Beunza (1972–3), a large-scale vocal and tape work on the theme of conscientious objection. Later, his defence of human values and freedom was recognized by the award of the Montaigne Prize of the Foundation of Hamburg (1994).
Halffter's attitude to his musical language has remained open and exploratory. In the 1970s, for example in the Cello Concerto no.1 (1974), aleatory techniques made up part of his vocabulary, while developments in electro-acoustic music have fed into his output up to the 1990s. In a number of works from the 1980s onwards, he has revealed an interest in creating a dialogue with music of the past, in particular with the Renaissance and Baroque. These include the Fantasia para una sonoridad de G.F. Haendel (1981), Paráfrasis (1984) and the highly successful Tiento de primer tono y batalla imperial (1986), in which the re-creation or citation of older Spanish music – Cabezón's Tiento and Cabanilles's Batalla imperial – is sharply contrasted with a contemporary idiom. A similar technique is found in the Second Cello Concerto, which quotes the popular song ¡Anda jaleo!, and in the Fandango for eight cellos and the Preludio para Madrid '92, both of which refer to the works of Soler. Other important works of the 1980s include the Variaciones Dortmund (1986), Preludio a Némesis (1988) and Carcion callada (1988, written in memory of Mompou). In the 1990s, a fully achieved maturity, coupled with stylistic pluralism is abundantly evident in, for example, the concentrated drama of Memento a Dresden (1994–5), the interaction of a sense of reality and surrealism in Odradek ‘Homenaje a F. Kafka’ (1996), and the spectacular Turbas (1997), first performed during the Semana de Música Religiosa at Cuenca, which reflects the popular ambience, somewhere between passion and celebration, of the grand street procession. In this work, as in the earlier Siete cantos de España (1991-2) and the Endechas para una reina de España (1994), Halffter may be seen to return to the Spanish roots of his early works without falling into folklorism.
Alongside the changing techniques and stylisitic traits during Halffter's career, many aspects of his music have remained consistent, especially the great flexibility of sonorous play and the expressive contrasts between outbursts of savagery on the one hand and, on the other, havens of serenity, in which time and sound itself appear to vanish. Continuity is often achieved by a process of gradual accumulation of sound (or its opposite) until a maximum point of tension is reached. Each work outlines very clearly its own individual space and sphere of action, playing microforms off against macroforms and maintaining a sense of continuity and causality from one moment to the next. On other occasions tension is created by the play of textural density (not necessarily in tandem with dynamics) or by the juxtaposition of harmonic complexity and spare polyphony. Another constant has been his interest in the other arts: Tiempo para espacios was written in homage to Chillida, Munoz, Sempere and Rivera; Mural sonantez (1993) is dedicated to Tapies; Daliana (1993-4) was inspired by the work of Salvador Dalí. In the opera Don Quijote, his most ambitious work to date, Halffter applies aleatory techniques to certain parameters, using them to construct a kind of polyphonic recitative in which certain recurring sounds, articulated clearly by timbral, rhythmic, harmonic and dynamic means, give meaning and expression both to the unfolding drama and to Halffter's allusions to music of the past, imparting a sense of unity to the work as a whole.
Halffter has come to be regarded as the most significant Spanish composer of his generation. His many awards include the National Music Prize of Spain in 1989, and honorary doctorates from the University of León and the Universidad Complutense, Madrid (1998).