Granados: Goyescas & other piano music

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.

CDA67846  64 minutes 9 seconds
‘Not to be missed … a superb evocation of Spain, especially The Maiden and the Nightingale, which is among the most treasurable piano pieces ever written. Ohlsson … sounds totally con ...
‘You can't go far wrong with Ohlsson, who could hardly be more affecting in Quejas, o La maja y el ruiseñor or more able to express the dark and glittering hearts of both El amor y la muerte ...
‘Ohlsson is very much the performer for the heart of the work … his feeling for the constant fluctuations of pace and mood infuses The Maiden with the Nightingale, right through to its won ...