In the two
Dialogues (1923) the keyboard textures are quite complex and decorative, and the mood is a little solitary and interior—there is an attempt at conversation, if only with oneself. The score is filled with Satiesque asides—‘expliquez’ … ‘questionnez’ … ‘répondez’ … ‘plus suppliant’ … ‘hésitez’ and even, in the second piece, ‘donnez des excuses’. The
Dialogues are rather atypical of Mompou’s style in their keyboard writing and in the slightly self-conscious wit of the score’s extra-musical indications. But they come at a point of transition for the composer, the end of an eremitic path which, some twenty years later, he would return to with the composition of
Paisajes, written for the pianist Carmen Bravo whom he had recently met and who was to become his wife.
from notes by Stephen Hough © 1997
