Enrique GRANADOS (1867-1916)
Goyescas (1911) [59.25]
Alicia de Larrocha, piano
rec. Decca Studios, West Hampstead, London, 1976
Presto CD
DECCA 411 958-2 [59.25]
For many years Alicia de Larrocha ruled unchallenged as the great exponent of Spanish pianism, and she made several recordings, both live and in the studio, of Granados’s cycle Goyescas along with its appendix in the form of the showpiece El Pelele. She captured from the very outset the composer’s attempts to marry Spanish idioms to a classical framework, and at the same time to capture the essence of Goya’s paintings which ushered in a new era of Iberian art. Granados went on the expand the work into his operatic masterpiece, still far too little known.
This recording, now reissued thanks to Presto Classics, was her penultimate of the cycle, originally made just in the pre-digital era but described as “digitally mastered“ and originally issued some seven years later as one of the earliest of Decca’s CDs, where it served not just to represent the music but to establish a new benchmark for the accuracy that the new medium brought to the sound of the piano in the studio. A mid-price Decca reissue comes as part of a two-CD set including the complete Albéniz Iberia, but the original disc of Goyescas alone has long vanished.
Her command of rubato and delicate tempo fluctuations is always convincing and natural. She also makes some minor adjustments to Granados’s scoring – adding sustained pedalling at the end of El amor y la muerte (producing some enchanting other-worldly chords in the process), and occasionally transposing a line up an octave for increased audibility. But these are all thoroughly justified amendments, and the composer’s scores are in any event not infallible as a guide to his intentions (the printed editions of his Spanish Dances, for example, contain examples where passages clearly intended to be exactly repeated are subjected to apparently almost random examples of varied notation).
There are four commercial recordings of Goyescas by de Larrocha in the catalogues, spanning early Decca mono sets made in the 1950s to
a final version from RCA. Differences in her interpretation, subtle and varied, are minimal; she was always totally in command of this music, and the relative merits of her various recordings have to be measured by the quality of the recorded sound. In that respect this late Decca set wins hands down
(the current single-disc reissue on RCA omits La pelele unless you
invest in the complete box of the pianist's Granados recordings). The booklet notes by Manuel Valls come in English, French and German.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
