A newly remastered collection of four original Decca albums featuring the Spanish mezzo-soprano at the height of her powers in the repertoire most associated with her, from Rossini to folk and popular songs from her native Spain. Born in 1935, Teresa Berganza was in her mid-twenties when she made the recordings on this album, yet […]
‘In every way the most transcendentally gifted young piano student I have heard in the last 25 years’ was Percy Grainger’s pronouncement of the young Eileen Joyce (1908–1991) when he first heard her play in 1926. From the goldfields in Western Australia whose capital city is the most remote in the world, Joyce defied incongruous and […]
A series of reissues on Eloquence has served to remind listeners around the world of the mastery of Alicia de Larrocha in repertoire ranging far beyond her native Spain, from Bach to Rachmaninov (including the Third Concerto with the LSO and André Previn, available on 482 0725). However, as Fanfare magazine noted in 1990, ‘her dominance […]
The ‘fresh, beautiful and critically underpraised’ voice (Gramophone) of Pilar Lorengar is celebrated here on an album of operatic arias, originally issued in 1980 by Decca as a portrait of the Spanish soprano who had entranced audiences on both sides of the Atlantic for three decades. ‘Our Pilar’as she was known affectionately at the Deutsche […]
In 1977, Decca released an LP entitled ‘Concertos from Spain’ which coupled two contemporary piano concertos – one by Montsalvatge (‘Concerto Breve’, written for Alicia de Larrocha) and the other, Surinach’s Piano Concerto. The Surinach recording – he was a kind of Spanish Khachaturian – has never before been released on CD. Taking advantage of the […]
Bizet’s ‘Carmen’ was misunderstood at its premiere in 1875. The Opéra-Comique was a place where respectable families could be entertained and where virginal daughters could be introduced to blameless sons with marriage in mind. No one expected to see uncouth gypsies, dirty smugglers and vulgar cigarette girls on its stage, let alone unvarnished human passions […]
Both the Albéniz works on this recording began life as piano pieces – the Suite española for solo piano (here orchestrated by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos) and the Rapsodia española for two pianos, orchestrated by Cristobal Halffter. They are given immensely colourful performances here, in glorious ‘Decca Sound’, with Burgos’s 1967 recording of the Suite […]
Jesús López-Cobos’s scintillating and sonically thrilling Decca recordings of Spanish music are here represented with music both Spanish and Spanish-influenced. Scenes and Dances from Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, Chabrier’s picture-postcard essay España and two works by Turina (one meditative, the other more extrovert) form the Spanish contingent of this orchestral recital, while Rimsky-Korsakov’s technicolour Capriccio […]
Although she disliked being typecast as a Spanish music specialist, there’s no doubt that Alicia de Larrocha’s way with this music is in a class by itself. No matter what the repertoire for a recital she gave, regardless of whether it included Spanish music, she was often called upon by her audiences to provide at […]
It is difficult to dissociate the pure, warm tones of Renata Tebaldi’s voice from her usual operatic repertoire – the heroines of the Italian lyric stage of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which, thanks to her exceptional vocal and dramatic endowment, she interpreted so superbly. That these unforgettable portrayals were not just the product […]
