Spanish Masterpieces

I think I may have been Spanish in an earlier lifetime because I always feel an instinctive "pull" towards the traditional rhythms and melodies of Spain, even though my traceable ancestry is doggedly Scottish with only a small dose of Swedish for variety!  Today I want to share some masterpieces of Spanish music for the piano.

The classical music of Spain in earlier years was entwined with the musical mainstreams of Europe.  This was partly due, no doubt, to the lengthy reign of the Austrian Habsburg family on the Spanish throne.  In fact, the Habsburg rulers exchanged compositions and composers with their brethren in central Europe on a regular basis.

A distinctively Spanish style in concert music only began to appear in the late 1800s.  A decisive influence was the musicologist Felipe Pedrell, who taught his students that classical concert music could and should be suffused with the melodies and rhythms of Spanish folk songs and dances.  Two composers in particular responded to Pedrell's teachings with major piano works.

The first was Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909).  Of the two main anchor points of his piano works, the first is the early Suite española of 1888.  Each piece of the suite consists of music of a dancelike quality inspired by a different region of Spain.  Most of the pieces are in three parts, with the slower centre section being a copla, which was normally a sung interlude in a dance.  Four of the eight pieces were completed and designated by Albéniz himself for this volume.  The other four were lifted out of other collections by the publishers who reissued this music out after his death.  The most famous of the eight is Asturias, which ironically has become mainly famous in arrangement for guitar.  Yet the whole point of the piece as Albéniz originally wrote it was certainly to translate the sound of the flamenco guitar to the keyboard.

Albéniz created his true masterpiece for piano late in life.  Iberia, a set of 12 "impressions" in 4 books, was composed in 1905-1908.  This music owes something in style to the French Impressionist composers, but most of all to the Spanish tradition.  These 12 pieces take the style of the Suite española and raise it to the ultimate degree of sophistication, complexity, and absolutely fiendish technical demands on the player.  Indeed, the music was so complex that Albéniz, himself a first-rank concert pianist, considered destroying the score on the grounds that it was unplayable!  Fortunately he did not.  It's not surprising that several people have tried their hands at arranging Iberia for full orchestra, as the piano writing is often very full, dense, symphonic in character.

Enrique Granados (1867-1916) was another student who took the ideas of Pedrell and elevated the traditional music of Spain into the concert realm.  Like Albéniz, he wrote in a variety of genres but his most enduring accomplishments were for the piano.  And, again like Albéniz, his music for piano is bookmarked by an early and a late masterpiece.

In 1890 he brought out his twelve Danzas españolas.  These inhabit very much the same sound world as the Albéniz Suite española of two years earlier.  Several of them have become famous in guitar transcriptions, most notably # 5 (Andaluza).

In 1911, Granados produced his greatest piano work, Goyescas, a set of six pieces inspired by Goya's paintings of life in Spain.  Each of the six pieces has an evocative title such as a painting might bear, and these titles strung together suggest the outline of a story, but no more detailed programme is given for the work.  The music is poetic, proud, lively, and languishing by turns, and in places develops a strongly improvisational character.  There is a seventh piece, El pelele, which Granados composed and published separately, but sometimes performed as an appendix to the Goyescas.  Like the Iberia of Albéniz, this is music of great complexity and technical bravura, but by contrast requires often a lighter touch and a gentler, more poetic approach.

For recordings of this music by Albéniz and Granados, there are basically two choices:
[1]  Alicia de Larrocha
[2]  Everyone else

The great Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha grew up in Barcelona, and studied at the Academia Marshall there with Frank Marshall, Granados' principal pupil.  She thus absorbed the style as close to the point of origin as one could possibly get!  Just how well she absorbed it can be heard in her several recordings of these pieces.  She has generally been acclaimed as the greatest Spanish pianist of the 20th century, and one of the great pianists of the century overall, and with good reason.

I have two sets, both on Decca CDs.  One is her 1986 digital recording of Iberia  and the Suite española, on 2 discs.  The other combines her earlier 1972 version of Iberia with her 1976 traversal of the Goyescas.  All of these are remarkable performances, penetrating deeper into the soul of the music than any other, and with absolutely fearless and flawless technical assurance.  I had the LP of her digital traversal of the Danzas españolas and wore it out by playing it so often.  Faced with a choice between de Larrocha and any other pianist, my simple question would be: why bother looking anywhere else?