Los Boleros de Toda la Vida

The music of Spain has exercised an exotic fascination, but often in forms adapted by foreign composers. Manuel de Falla is representative of a group of Spanish composers who won international recognition. He was born in 1876 in Cádiz, where he first studied, moving later to Madrid and then to Paris, returning to Madrid when war broke out in 1914. Strongly influenced by the traditional Andalusian cante jondo, he settled in Granada, where his friends included the poet Federico García Lorca.

The reissue game continues. All of this material has been available more or less continuously in recent years, with the exception of Frühbeck's Three-Cornered Hat, which only resurfaced quite recently on an EMI twofer accompanied by Atlántida. The reason it reappears here, evidently, stems from the fact that this two-disc set contains all of Victoria de Los Angeles' stereo Falla recordings; and despite the fact that she sings for about 60 seconds in total in "Hat", it's always a pleasure to hear Frühbeck's big-hearted, expansively Romantic but always exciting way with the music.

This album contains a collection of works from the Seicento, most of them well known and recorded several times, although it also includes a composition (Cazzati’s La Verità sprezzata) that is little or not very often heard. It is a repertoire to which we have usually devoted ourselves. That is why we wanted to propose our own way of doing it, in all honesty and avoiding fashions and artifice, without pretentiousness, respecting only the rhetorical —and dramatic— discourse implicit in the texts and their setting to music, fleeing from affectation —but not from affetti— and unquestioned customs, taking advantage of the information provided by musicological research, making use of our intuition and experience, and also remembering the teaching we have received from our old masters. Inspired by Ripa’s allegory and by the idea of truth as άλήθεια or unveiling of the self that is hidden by the veil of appearance, we have endowed our performance with a certain natural simplicity, a deliberate nakedness, especially in moments of particular emotional intensity.

Patricia Petibon's album Melancolía: Spanish Arias and Songs is a result of the soprano's lifelong fascination with the music and culture of Spain, with a special interest in the ways Spanish and French influences have cross-pollinated. She has put together an exceptionally attractive selection of songs and arias from zarzuelas, most of them likely to be unfamiliar to general audiences. Petibon is known for her light, silvery coloratura, and her gift for inhabiting her roles, both dramatic and comic, with great spirit and penetrating insight.

The sultry warm atmosphere of an Andalusian night is almost palpable in Falla’s spellbinding Noches en los jardines de España. With its shimmering, sensuous harmonies, exquisite orchestral colours and exuberant melodies and rhythms, it’s perhaps Falla’s most impressionistic work. Using a large orchestral canvas on which he paints with deft, luminous strokes, Falla skilfully integrates a virtuoso piano part to create lovingly evocative music, full of captivating beauty.

The Mass by Machaut is the earliest complete setting of the Mass text that we have. It was composed for performance in a specific church (in which this recording is made) for a specific occasion and has performance connections to the composer and his family. The performance is excellent and the recording quite clear, especially the mass, using the acoustic of a large stone church.

Over the years Glossa has been at the forefront of releasing recordings of late Renaissance madrigals, and the label has had the pleasure of assisting superlative artists in doing so: none more so than the voices of La Venexiana and its director Claudio Cavina. This release is a reflection of such creative richness. The recordings on this release date from the dozen years after La Venexianas foundation in 1996, a time of great activity for the ensemble, and which complements the Monteverdi Complete Madrigals Books set, released previously. These two impressive collections demonstrate effectively why La Venexiana has been so popular with audiences and why it has been praised by critics as well.

Fabulous guitar in name and fabulous guitar in sound; along with a carefully selected repertoire, which shows off a refined panorama of the Flamenco toque offering an intelligent variety of genres for this his first full length album as a solo artist. The titles of the tracks selected show his great connection to the land, offering us a selection of the fundamental styles of the Flamenco geography: ‘Triana’, ‘Cádiz’, ‘Punta Umbría’, ‘Jerez’, ‘La Unión’, ‘La Caleta’ and ‘El Tajo’. Recorded when Paco was just 19, in addition to the use of the Flamenco techniques of the time (reverb, echo, etc.), here there is a superb sense of the compass of Flamenco, a fabulous right hand technique (thumb, alzapua, strumming), dizzying picados and perfect legato of the left hand.