Volume 65 (have you got them all?) of Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series journeys to Spain and the heart-on-sleeve world there to be found. The Albéniz Concierto fantástico owes much to Schumann and Chopin, albeit with an added drizzle of the Iberian peninsula; the perennially popular Rapsodia española, on the other hand, throws all such classical models to the wind.
Granados never actually got round to writing his piano concerto, so our pianist here—Hyperion debutant Melani Mestre—has done it for him. And it’s a romp. The first movement is pretty much ‘echt’, from Granados’ sketches for a putative piano concerto, but thereafter it’s a hugely enjoyable what-if …
‘Impeccably recorded, all the performances by Melani Mestre and the BBC Scottish Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins are of an unfaltering fluency and stylistic command’ (Gramophone)
BBC Music Magazine
‘Both [concertos] fall attractively within the rubric of Hyperion's successful Romantic Piano Concertos series, of which this is a remarkable 65th volume’ (The Sunday Times)
BBC Music Magazine‘Both [concertos] fall attractively within the rubric of Hyperion's successful Romantic Piano Concertos series, of which this is a remarkable 65th volume’ (The Sunday Times)