Granados

The familiar declaration that Enrique Granados’s suite Goyescas—Los Majos enamorados (The Majos in Love) and Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia form the twin peaks of Spanish keyboard music is accurate as far as it goes, but it does not go far. The good intentions behind this declaration ultimately parochialize, if not to say diminish, Goyescas as well as Iberia by qualifying them in relation to other piano works by composers from the Iberian peninsula, not in relation to the varied topographies of all piano works. From an international or cosmopolitan perspective, the Goyescas suite may be suituated between Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), a memorial to the work of the artist Victor Hartmann, and Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917), a memorial to both Couperin “le Grand” (in particular, the French Baroque keyboard suite) and friends of the composer who died in the Great War.

A deeply seductive album of Spanish songs by composers including Granados and Turina, performed by the young Spanish soprano Sylvia Schwartz, whose commitment to this repertoire is described above, and is evident from her utterly enchanting performances.

Douglas Riva is an American pianist and a scholar of Spanish music. He studied with with Alicia de Larrocha and worked with her in producing a complete edition of Granados' works. Ms. de Larrocha is a master of this music, and her CDs are available on more expensive record labels. But Mr. Riva plays beautifully, with virtuosic technique, and with sensitivity to this highly-charged romantic score.

Francisco Goya's paintings have left a powerful imprint on the European imagination. It was undoubtedly Granados who best translated into music, with nobility and humour, this colourful universe where majos and majas dance to love and death in the twilight glow of a dying Ancien Régime.