Granados

Goyescas; Allegro de Concierto; Valses Poeticos; Seis piezas sobre cantos populares españolas – Zapateado Xiayin Wang (piano)

Chandos CHAN 10995 69:57 mins

The piano music of Enrique Granados (18671916) combines a Spanish brand of Romantic tonepoetry with exceptional virtuosity, and nowhere more so than in his masterpiece, Goyescas. Inspired by the painter Goya’s Caprichos, Granados’s suite ref lects his love for that series of etchings, with their majos and majas – young men and women from the old quarter of Madrid – embodying the pains and pleasures of city life. The first piece, ‘Los requiebros’ (The Greeting), sees two tunes meet and meld in a spontaneous-seeming effusion of colour and texture ornamented with filigree embellishments, while the second, ‘Coloquio en la reja’ – a musical encounter between a boy and his girl separated by the bars of his prison window – reaches a peak of ardour before the boy with his guitar sadly retreats back into the shadows.

Xiayin Wang’s approach may be cooler than that of Alicia de Larrocha, who brought a pulsating warmth to this work, but Wang’s shading and control of effects is beautifully calibrated. She brings a crisp touch to the third piece with its dizzy edifice of scurrying triplets; and if she doesn’t follow the composer’s instruction for the fourth – that it should be played ‘with the jealousy of a wife, not the sadness of a widow’ – she nonetheless vividly evokes the encounter between the lonely protagonist and her nightingale confidant.

Everything else on this disc is super-refined in its delivery – even the rather ordinary ‘poetic waltzes’. The Zapateado is springy and exuberant, and the Allegro de concierto dazzles as a conservatoire firework should. Michael Church PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★