Granados: Goyescas (piano suite) (Los majos enamorados)

The two books of Goyescas constitute Granados’s best and most durable, as well as his best-known, music. Subtitled Los majos enamorados (Young men in love) they are highly imaginative transcriptions into music of the tapestries and pictures of Francisco Goya (1746-1828), the wild and demonic genius who with Velasquez is usually thought of as one of the great exemplars of Spanish painting. They were completed in 1911 and first performed by Granados himself in Barcelona on 9 March that year. Publication in 1914 was in two books, the first four pieces in one and the remaining two in a second. Each of the Goyecas has a different dedication: the best-known of them, Quejas ó la Maya y el Ruiseñor, Granados inscribed to his wife Amparo; the others are to the pianists Emil [von] Sauer, Édouard Risler, Ricardo Viñes, Harold Bauer and Alfred Cortot respectively.

Released to mark the centenary of the Georgian-born pianist Nikita Magaloff’s birth, these recordings were made over two periods in Geneva’s Victoria Hall (a hallowed Decca recording venue) – in November 1952 (Book I and El pelele) and October/November 1954 (Book II). This is their first release on Decca CD. Lyndon Jenkins writes the excellent sleeve notes.

Daniel del Pino is one of the leading Spanish concert pianists on the international scene and his performances have been heard in the most prestigious venues all over Europe. He is a frequent guest at numerous festivals and has premiered works by José Zárate, Elena Kats-Chernin, Nicolai Kapustin, Francisco Latra and Antón Garcia-Abril.

Garrick Ohlsson injects some much-needed Mediterranean light into this dark time of year with Granados’s pianistic masterpiece, Goyescas. Written in the first decade of the twentieth century, it’s a musical tribute to the great Spanish artist Francisco de Goya, under whose spell Granados had fallen as a young man. Filled with a patriotic fervour for what he saw as a universally great Spanish genius, he wrote several pieces inspired by the painter’s life and times. The six pieces that make up Goyescas are no mere tone-poems but instead draw on details from Goya’s works—notably the Caprichos, a sequence of aquatints that satirized (and outraged) Spanish society. They draw on Spanish folk music too, as in the famous dialogue between the Maiden and the Nightingale, complete with a trilling cadenza at the end for the nightingale.

Another product of Granados’s preoccupation with the painter was the exuberant El pelele, which recounts the tale of a straw man being tossed on a trampoline, while the Allegro de concierto forms a fittingly brilliant endpiece.

The ‘Goyescas’ of Enrique Granados, inspired by the Madrid of Goya's time which the painter immortalised with his marvellous palette of colours, is - along with ‘Iberia’ by Issac Albéniz - one of the two great solo piano cycles of Spanish music. It represents both the peak of Granados' career as composer and performer and his most important contribution to the classical repertoire as a whole.

Born in 1977 in Madrid, Luis Fernando Perez studied with Dimitri Bashkirov, Alicia de Larrocha and Pierre-Laurent Aimard. As you might expect his forte is Spanish music especially that of Granados, Albeniz and de Falla. His last record for Mirare was dedicated to the sonatas of the baroque Spanish composer Antonio Soler, where all the sonatas were revised from the original manuscripts and which contains an unpublished sonata. It was awarded the ‘Exceptional Record’ prize from Spanish magazine, ‘Scherzo.’

Recordings are still thin on the ground for one of the 20th-century’s great piano-cycles, so any new or reissued one is bound to attract attention, especially when played here with such exuberant mastery by a champion of such music, especially well known both in Spanish-speaking countries and inn the UK., where she has long been a favourite performer, much beloved of audiences for her sparkling virtuosity and easy-going, appealing platform-manner.

As its name suggests, Goyescas are reactions in sound to one of Spain’s great painters, Francisco Goya (1746–1828). The subversive and imaginative element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso.

It also stimulated the creative imagination of Enrique Granados, who was in the van of attempts to create an authentically Spanish musical aesthetic at the end of the 19th-century. Goyescas is his late masterpiece, full of colour and sadness and wild changes of mood just as Goya’s art was. It also had a decisive influence on many subsequent composers, not all of them Spanish: perhaps no one followed more devotedly in the footsteps of Granados than Manuel de Falla, and Ortíz completes her recital with three little-known but charming miniatures.