Miguel Baselga's on-going traversal of the piano music by Isaac Albéniz has shown
that there is much more to the composer than the four books of Iberia usually
regarded as his crowning achievement. The present disc largely concentrates on the
early production, including Marcha militar, the very first piece that Albéniz is
known to have composed, at the age of nine. With the Six Mazurkas de salon and
L'Automne-Valse Baselga also gives us a taste of the salon-type music that Albéniz
often included in his own recital programmes during the 1880s and 1890s. The
mazurkas were written for (and named after) six of Albéniz' piano pupils, daughters
of important upper-class families in Madrid. The most familiar work here is Chants
d'Espagne, partly because two of its five movements also appear in another work,
Suite Espagnole, and partly because of various transcriptions for one or more
guitars. With a specific reference to Córdoba, the fourth movement of Chants,
Albéniz himself remarked: 'That music of youth, with its little sins and
absurdities. appears to me like the carvings in the Alhambra, those peculiar
arabesques that say nothing with their turns and shapes, but which are like the air,
like the sun, like the blackbirds or like the nightingales of its gardens.' The
programme also includes a transcription published in 2009 of a phonograph roll from
1903, with Albéniz himself improvising at the piano, and the humorous Yvonne en
visite!, in which the composer describes in music the nervousness of a small girl
forced by her mother to play for him. All of this is performed with relish by
Baselga, who in reviews of the previous disc of the series has been described as 'a
pianist of great range and sophistication' (MusicWeb International) and 'a musician
who unites poetry and lyricism with the Mediterranean light depicted by Albéniz' (CD
Compact).
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