Piano, Vol. 2

SKU: BO.BC0006

Despite a strong vocation for the cello, which he studied and began to play with a distinctive character, Pau Casals, like most ambitious, creative musicians, wrote at the piano and for the piano, as it is the ultimate teaching instrument, summarising the full vision of the creative process. Any creative musician habitually worked at the piano, whether for this instrument alone or for piano accompanied by other solo instruments. To date, it has not been possible to document whether Casals had systematic training on this instrument, although at that time it was more common than it is today because, considering its qualities of timbre and combination, it was particularly attractive for creating test pieces and different kinds of compositions.

The piano works contained in this second volume include part of the salon repertoire, a continuation of the first volume, and four sardanas for piano of diverse origin: some are reductions of more complex forms and others sketches for instrumental groups. In the first group, some works intended for children are published, a demonstration of the tenderness the ‘cellist felt for the children of his closest friends. In the second case, the sardanas are works from his first exile in Prada and show the nostalgia of the composer, away from his country against his will.

In general, the works are not especially complex; their purpose and nature are diverse. They come in the context of salon music, with the appearance of creative entertainments characterised by a basically tonal, transparent language with a widespread tendency to modulate to nearby keys more as a momentary expressive resource than as a structural evolutionary procedure. They show a lack of systematic work on the instrument as well as the commonplaces of piano composition of their time. In some of these works, the piano thread breaks, the works do not have the thrust of finished products; the occasional appearance of chords that are difficult or impossible to finger leads us to think of intentions closer to test pieces than to products intended for normal performance. But not all these piano works are circumstantial. There is also a prelude and a minuet of a certain piano writing complexity.