Garrick Ohlsson - Granados: Goyescas & Other Piano Music (2012)

Tracklist

01. Goyescas, Suite: I. Los requiebros
02. Goyescas, Suite: II. Coloquio en la reja, duo de amor
03. Goyescas, Suite: III. El fandango de candil
04. Goyescas, Suite: IV. Quejas, o La maja y el ruiseñor
05. Goyescas, Suite: V. El amor y la muerte, balada
06. Goyescas, Suite: VI. Epílogo, serenata del espectro
07. El pelele "Escena goyesca"
08. Allegro de concierto

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.

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