Enrique Granados - Goyescas (Alicia de Larrocha)

Information

Composer: Enrique Granados

• Goyescas
• El Pelele

Alicia de Larrocha, piano

Date: 1976

Label: Decca

-----------------------------------------------------------

Review

For many years Alicia de Larrocha ruled unchallenged as the great exponent of Spanish pianism, and she made several recordings, both live and in the studio, of Granados’s cycle Goyescas along with its appendix in the form of the showpiece El Pelele. She captured from the very outset the composer’s attempts to marry Spanish idioms to a classical framework, and at the same time to capture the essence of Goya’s paintings which ushered in a new era of Iberian art. Granados went on the expand the work into his operatic masterpiece, still far too little known.

This recording, now reissued thanks to Presto Classics, was her penultimate of the cycle, originally made just in the pre-digital era but described as “digitally mastered“ and originally issued some seven years later as one of the earliest of Decca’s CDs, where it served not just to represent the music but to establish a new benchmark for the accuracy that the new medium brought to the sound of the piano in the studio. A mid-price Decca reissue comes as part of a two-CD set including the complete Albéniz Iberia, but the original disc of Goyescas alone has long vanished.

Her command of rubato and delicate tempo fluctuations is always convincing and natural. She also makes some minor adjustments to Granados’s scoring – adding sustained pedalling at the end of El amor y la muerte (producing some enchanting other-worldly chords in the process), and occasionally transposing a line up an octave for increased audibility. But these are all thoroughly justified amendments, and the composer’s scores are in any event not infallible as a guide to his intentions (the printed editions of his Spanish Dances, for example, contain examples where passages clearly intended to be exactly repeated are subjected to apparently almost random examples of varied notation).

There are four commercial recordings of Goyescas by de Larrocha in the catalogues, spanning early Decca mono sets made in the 1950s to a final version from RCA. Differences in her interpretation, subtle and varied, are minimal; she was always totally in command of this music, and the relative merits of her various recordings have to be measured by the quality of the recorded sound. In that respect this late Decca set wins hands down (the current single-disc reissue on RCA omits La pelele unless you invest in the complete box of the pianist's Granados recordings). The booklet notes by Manuel Valls come in English, French and German.

— Paul Corfield Godfrey

-----------------------------------------------------------

Enrique Granados (27 July 1867 – 24 March 1916) was a Spanish composer and pianist from Catalonia. A student of Felipe Pedrell, he rose to prominence with his Danzas españolas and soon established himself as one of Spain's foremost pianists. In addition to his celebrated piano works, Granados also composed several operas and founded a piano academy in Barcelona. Deeply influenced by 18th-century and Spanish artistic traditions, he created the renowned Goyescas, inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya. Granados's life ended tragically when the Sussex was torpedoed during his return voyage from New York.

***

Alicia de Larrocha (23 May 1923 – 25 September 2009) was a Spanish pianist, considered as one of the 20th century's greatest piano legends. Born in Barcelona, she began piano studies at age three with Frank Marshall. She debuted at six at the 1929 Seville World's Fair and performed with an orchestra by eleven. By the 1940s, she was a major concert attraction in Spain and soon toured internationally, including North America and Southern Africa. Famed for her interpretations of Spanish composers such as Albéniz, Granados, de Falla and Mompou, she received multiple awards for her extensive recordings.

-----------------------------------------------------------