Re: Mandolin orchestra videos on Youtube
My warmest and most enthusiastic congratulations to all of you!
By way of context: this orchestration stemmed from one of the issues of my tiny, and ~quite~ non-commercial GrecoMando Editions, originally as a duet for (one) mandolin and guitar. For those interested, I simply cut and paste the introduction of that edition.
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Nikolaos Halikiopoulos Mántzaros was born on October 26, 1795, in Kérkyra (Corfu); he died in his native city on March 31, 1872. In 1826, he moved to Italy, where he studied at the Naples Conservatory with the great pedagogue Nicola Zingarelli, teacher also of Vincenzo Bellini, Saverio Mercadante, and several other notable composers of the Italian concert and operatic stage.
Upon Zingarelli's retirement in 1835, Mántzaros was offered the directorship of the Naples Conservatory by his admiring teacher; he was later offered a similar position at the Milan Conservatory. He declined both offers, as he had already returned to Kérkyra, where he single-handedly directed the local Philharmonic Society and the Conservatory, taught all musical subjects pro bono, and even assisted his neediest and worthiest students at his own expense.
Mántzaros’ fame —in Greece alone— rests on his setting of the Greek National Anthem, "Hymn to Liberty", on poetry by Dionysios Solomós. Apart from that one composition, however, his work remains unknown. Yet Mántzaros composed 12 Fugues for Piano, 3 Masses (one for the Orthodox, and two for the Catholic liturgy), one Cantata, Lamentations of Jeremiah, Psalms of David, works for piano, numerous songs and works for vocal ensemble, as well as 24 Symphonies-Overtures.
The Sinfonie-Overture are one-movement, yet sectional works, in the style of Italian academic classicism. The extant manuscripts are in "short score": two staves, one in treble, one in bass clef. The texture consists of a rhythmically vigorous melody, an almost equally active countermelody in the bass, and sparse, chordal inner voices. There is no authoritative evidence on the intended instrumentation.
The texture of these works hardly speaks of pianistic writing. It is most likely that, when his schedule allowed, Mántzaros would have "spread out" these charming compositions (which were after all the major corpus of his compositional output) for some sort of ensemble, creating a proper conductor’s score and writing out parts for the various instruments; his total devotion to his students and their needs over his own ambitions never allowed him the time to do so. The Symphonies were never performed in their composer’s lifetime.
It is the editor’s firm belief that plucked instruments, so broadly popular in the Ionian Islands during the 19th century, would have certainly struck the composer as at least one possibility for instrumentation of the Symphonies. We have therefore picked up this presumed intention of Mántzaros where he left it and scored his Sinfonia-Overtura Nş 5 in E major for mandolin and guitar. We find that the result is convincingly, beautifully, and charmingly fitting for plucked/picked instruments; in fact, it is hard to imagine any instruments other than mandolins and guitars that would capture the work’s character as aptly. We hope you agree.
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Thanks to the skills and talents of ATTIKA, one of my fondest dreams has come true. I am deeply grateful to this young, high-spirited group, and look forward to their development in the years to come.
Three cheers for Attika, Mántzaros, and the organizers of the Bulgarian festival.
Victor
It is not man that lives but his work. (Ioannis Kapodistrias)
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