Granados: Allegro de concierto, Op. 46

Rosa Antonelli evokes the memories of Latin sounds for her second recording on Albany Records. Born in Argentina, Ms. Antonelli enjoys an active and varied performance career. She has been hailed as a leading exponent of Spanish and Latin American music, which she has performed to audiences around the world in extensive tours that have taken her to Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America. Trained at the National Conservatory in Buenos Aires, she was also a participant in the International University Music Program in Santiago de Compostela where she received the Rosa Sabater Award for her interpretation of Spanish music. Her first recording on Albany Records, Esperanza-Sounds of Hope, received critical praise as did her New York debut at Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall, where Harris Goldsmith wrote that her “…inward poetry forced me to rehear, and revalue Piazzolla’s Tangos, which she infused with an eloquence and inner communication…”

Spanish pianist, Maria Lluisa Cantos is a well known exponent of romantic music, in particular Spanish music, and has premiered works by Albeniz, Granados, Falla and Montsalvage. Here she performs a selection of her favourite works.

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.

Yoko Suzuki began her piano training at the age of three and at the tender age of five she began accompanying on the organ at her local church. In 2001, she decided to move to Barcelona. There she studied with the great pianist and teacher Alicia de Larrocha. In addition, she became acquainted with the works of the composer Mompou and is now managed by his widow, the pianist Carmen Bravo.