Granados: Goyescas (Fernando Pérez)

An lovely performance of one of the most luxuriant suites ever written for the piano. Most people who know this suite are probably familiar with de Larrocha’s rhythmic vigor, but her student here has a very different approach to such music – rhythmically supple and full of delicate voicing, where key changes are treated as moments of ecstasy rather than just elements of structure or colouration. There is something dark and glittering that runs like a vein through of Perez’s playing, and a sumptuous sense of freedom that’s probably warranted in this music – music that’s almost absurdly in love the sound of its expression, whose complications only become more improvisatory (in the best sense) as they knot and thicken, and whose rhythmic flights are buried under so much harmonic opulence they’re almost unnoticeable. Goyescas, Los majos enamorados (The Gallants in Love): 00:00 – 1. Los requiebros (The Compliments) 09:36 – 2. Coloquio en la reja (Conversation at the Window) 20:50 – 3. El fandango de candil (Fandango by Candlelight) 27:03 – 4. Quejas, o La Maja y el ruiseñor (Complaint, or the Girl and the Nightingale) 34:23 – [Intermezzo] 39:03 – 5. El Amor y la muerte (Balada) (Ballad of Love and Death) 52:29 – 6. Epilogo: Serenata del espectro (Epilogue: Serenade to a Spectre)