PANCHO VLADIGEROV - PLAYED BY ETSUKO HIROSE
Nostalgia for the Modernist Twenties is in full swing this year of 2022, with a celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published a hundred years ago, whilst on Radio 4 a softly posh and polished voice has been reading Virginia Woolf’s version of the stream of consciousness novel, a day in the life, Mrs. Dalloway published the same year. Music of a hundred years ago was however a much more crowded platform with innovation at its core .Established now as part of the classical canon, Shostakovich, Francis Poulenc, Sergei Prokofiev were in full creative swing. Delius over here was in full creative flow and in France Maurice Ravel published La Valse . And the amazing Erik Satie - all of them modernistic in their own way, some really way out - Satie had two pianos in his apartment . Not unusual until you know they were one on top of another.
Pancho Vladigerov ,Bulgarian composer with his Impressions of 1922
The composer Pancho Vladigerov is not well known now but during his lifetime he conquered the grand concert halls of Europe and was acclaimed by the top musicians of his day as a genius Shostakovich himself declared there had been no greater composer for the past hundred years , and the famous violinist David Oistrakh wrote to him in glowing terms ‘My dear Pancho! It is my pleasure to inform you that I listened to your second concert… As usual, your music is full of life, of vibrant colours and stands out with its rich temperament. You compose like a 20-year-old man! Well done!…” excerpt from a letter to Pancho Vladigerov, 16 November 1971, nearly fifty years after these early piano pieces.
Vladigerov grew in Bulgaria with a careful musical background. His recollection of it would fit today’s young emerging musicians . He believed in “the importance of exposing children to good music from infancy and developing good musical sense” and that “the pieces they hear must be of highest quality from the beginning. That’s why my mother made up her mind to raise me by ensuring I listened to recordings by legendary artists, every day from morning to evening from a very early age. I was one month old, and the music became for me something indispensable like oxygen.” Possibly one month old is a bit young, but many musicologists would agree with this early start.
Yet if Pancho Vladigerov is, despite that infant training and remarkable acclaim in his lifetime, little known today , the Japanese mistress of the the keyboard Etsuko Hirose on piano is not. She has appeared before in The Cambridge Critique with her interpretations of Claude Debussy. Here she is again on this CD with more reflective themes in a version of Pancho’s energetic 1920s work Impressions Opus 9. Hirose plays with joyful assertiveness in this sequence of modern- sounding pieces of pure lyricism, written when the Bulgarian composer was living in Berlin. Young Pancho was madly, passionately in love with the woman after whom he named these lovely pieces, Viola. The sequence opens with a free improvisation of energetic playfulness, ‘ Longeur’ - the time away from the beloved possibly? After the languor of separation comes Embrace and then later Caress, all beautifully and gently evocative of the depths of deep romantic love. A happier, even ecstatic piece ,Embrace follows. In the sensitive hands of Etsuko Hirose these melodic works seem simple and spontaneous, but driven on with the powerful skill of a composer on the brink of first love. Yes, the sequence ends with Resignation, the broken heart, the sighs, the despair of love unrequited? Or love ended for another man? We know not. Just sit back and enjoy a new musician from the past and let his Japanese artistic interpreter weave her soothing spell over you.
The last words to a sincere admirer Professor Joseph Marx“
Powerful harmony, a spring of multiple sounds, colourful orchestral tunes – all these demonstrate his music, but what is more – a person who makes the best of an extraordinary gift”
