Music of Joaquin Turina this week. His Second Piano Trio played in this broadcast recording by the Halifax Trio of Canada (the same ones who did the Violet Archer Trio last week), sometime around 1962.
Joaquín Turina, (born December 9, 1882, Sevilla, Spain—died January 14, 1949, Madrid), Spanish composer who helped to promote the national character of 20th-century Spanish music.
After studying in Sevilla (Seville) and Madrid, Turina went in 1905 to Paris, where he was a pupil of Moritz Moszkowski for piano and Vincent d’Indy for composition. Though he absorbed elements of the French style, he was inspired in Paris by Isaac Albéniz to write distinctively Spanish music. He wrote the Sonata española for violin and piano and the symphonic poem La procesión del rocío (1912) and in 1914 returned to Spain. Turina’s native city, Sevilla, figures largely in his mostly picturesque works, notably in the Sinfonía sevillana (1920), in the Canto a Sevilla (1927; “Song to Seville”) for voice and orchestra, and in his albums of piano miniatures, among them Rincones sevillanos (“Sevillian Nooks”) and La leyenda de la Giralda (“The Legend of Giralda”). He was most successful in his many songs. He also wrote two operas, Margot (1914) and Jardín de oriente (1923; “Garden of the East”), incidental music, and chamber works. His Danzas fantásticas (1920; “Fantastic Dances”) for orchestra and La oración del torero (1925; “The Torero’s Speech”) for string quartet or string orchestra were particularly popular. Turina was critic for the Madrid paper El Debate and wrote a short encyclopedia of music.
The Halifax Trio. One of Canada’s longest-lived chamber ensembles. A piano trio, it was founded in 1955 in Halifax by Francis Chaplin, violin, Edward Bisha, cello, and Gordon Macpherson, piano, and established a national reputation through its many CBC broadcasts. Aided by a Canada Council grant the members of the trio moved to Brandon University in 1966 as artists-in-residence and remained there as the Brandon University Trio. Bisha was succeeded in 1968 by Malcolm Tait who was replaced in 1985 by the Swedish cellist, Ingemar Ohlsson. In 1991 MacPherson retired from Brandon University but remained in the trio. A repertoire of over 100 trios includes the standard works, as well as compositions by Violet Archer, S.C. Eckhardt-Gramatté, Michel Perrault, Robert Turner, and Arnold Walter. In 1963 a work by Barbara Pentland was commissioned for the group by the CBC and in 1989 the trio commissioned, assisted by the MAC, Trio Classico by Brandon University colleague, Kenneth Nichols. This was featured in the trio’s tour of Ontario and Quebec which ended at McGill University. The trio has continued to give yearly concerts in Manitoba.
Enjoy.
