Pianist Marcos Madrigal will premiere an album with works by Carlos Guastavino

October 27, 2020

Cuban pianist Marcos Madrigal will premiere the album Carlos Guastavino, Piano Music on November first under the Dutch record label Piano Classics.

Madrigal, a renowned Cuban pianist at the national and international level, confessed in the album's liner notes the symbolic and emotional weight that returning to this repertoire represented for him, which in one way or another has always been present in his life, and with which he pays tribute to the great Argentine composer Carlos Guastavino (Santa Fe, 1912-2000).

This is not Marcos Madrigal's first approach to Guastavino's compositions, as he recently premiered an album of 23 songs titled Guastavino Song Cycles, alongside Italian soprano Letizia Calandra, which confirms the pianist as a champion of classical Latin American compositions.

The Dutch record label Piano Classics, specialized in classical piano repertoire and part of the Brilliant Classics record company, is taking on Madrigal's new musical production.

Carlos Guastavino, Piano Music is comprised of Ten Argentine Cantilenas, composed in the 1950s; Ten Popular Songs, conceived in 1974; a piano version of the song El Sampedrino, from 1992; and Bailecito, from 1940.

Musicologist Claudia Fallarero, in her liner notes for this album, expressed that Marcos Madrigal's measured and impressionistic sound reveals in the recording a mature interpreter, capable not only of displaying impetuosity but also of manifesting extreme lyricism and a wide spectrum of nuances within an unsurpassable control of sound.

In the works selected for this recording, a common denominator is found in the attachment to cultural roots and Argentine folklore present in much of Guastavino's work, paying homage in them to people close to him or situations that shaped his idiosyncrasy, his experiences and affections, as well as recurrent places from a nostalgic, contemplative, and poetic vision.