Frank Wallace

composer

10 Apr 2014
Elemental: new CD of guitar solos
Elemental signifies the root, the essence, the building blocks of life and physical being.  It reflects the raw and powerful dis-passion of nature as portrayed in the first work, The Elements: Fire, Earth, Air and Water.  (The fifth element, The Void, is what lies between the notes.)  The third recording of my solo works for classical guitar, Elemental is contemplative, earthly, dramatic at times, lyrical occasionally.  Perhaps the most all-inclusive description would be textural, or abstract.  I employ many compositional styles and techniques, from tone row fragments to modal polyphony and drones.  My favorite is to derive pitch sets from names—my starting point for A Heavy Sleep, The Bells and Passing in the Night.

I recorded this CD on an extraordinary instrument. In 1929, smitten by Andrés Segovia’s concerts in Geneva, the young violinist Blanche Honegger (1909-2011) asked Segovia if she could study with him, which she did, even living for a time in the Segovia household in Paris. Two years later, Segovia commissioned a concert guitar from Hermann Hauser I.  Of the two instruments Hauser delivered, Segovia kept one.  The other, the guitar on this CD, he gave to Blanche. At the end of World War II, now a member of the illustrious Moyse Trio with her husband and father-in-law, she left France, ultimately settling in Vermont, where they were among the founders of the Marlboro Music Festival.  There Blanche Moyse became renowned as a conductor. Her Hauser guitar, which had not weathered well the long journey, eventually came into the hands of my good friend Edmund Brelsford.  When I first played it in the early 1990s it had not fully rediscovered its voice after initial work on it by David Rubio.  In 1999 Hermann Hauser III, the master’s grandson, undertook a major restoration.  To celebrate the guitar’s revival, I was given the honor of performing several concerts on it, and there it was:  a sunburst of sound, with colors of every hue, and a decay like none other  —each tone ever-so-reluctantly melting into the next. Its true voice, muted for fifty years, sings again.  Enjoy!
Frank Wallace

The Elements, op. 29 (2004)
01) Fire – 4:53
02) Earth – 3:32
03) Air – 3:28
04) Water – 3:56

05) A Heavy Sleep, op. 76 (2013) – 4:37

06) Black Falcon, op. 74 (2012) – 9:19

The Bells, op. 61
07) d’Orleans – 1:29
08) d’Angelus – 4:42
09) In the Well – 5:35

Sonata One, op. 32 (2005)
10) Allegro Apassionato- 4:23
11) Grave – 3:49
12) Prestissimo – 3:00

Passing in the Night, op. 71 (2012
13) ‘Round the World – 2:09
14) Don’t say Goodbye – 2:17
15) Par 9 – 0:55
16) Say Au Revoir – 1:06
17) I’m still your Pappy – 2:56

TOTAL TIME: 62:08

 

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