Viviana Lasaracina – Granados: Goyescas Op. 11 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:17 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Dynamic
Spanish music reached a peak early in the 20th century, with Enrique Granados Goyescas numbered amongst the crowning masterpieces of its day. Infused with the innovations of Debussy and Ravel, and inspired by the colours and emotional depth of Goyas paintings and engravings, the Goyescas are like brilliant and psychologically elaborate improvisations filled with seductively ornamented harmonies. The cycle also conceals a narrative of love and death that Granados would later develop into an opera. Multi-award-winning pianist Viviana Lasaracinas playing was admired for its beautiful liquid tone and summed up as breathtaking in the New York Concert Review. Viviana Lasaracina has received first place awards at important international piano competitions in Salt Lake City, Pretoria, Spain, Poznan, Germany, Finland and London (where she won second prize and the Best Performance of a Classical Work prize at the Open Piano competition in 2012). In March 2014 she debuted at New Yorks Carnegie Hall. Lasaracina has an intense concert schedule, appearing as a soloist, with orchestra, and in chamber ensembles at important venues and major festivals in Italy and abroad.
There are dozens of active recordings of Enrique Granados’ masterpiece Goyescas in the catalog, and the standard one by Alicia de Larrocha is still entirely viable, but this 2021 release by pianist Viviana Lasaracina has hit the charts, and it’s easy to see why. The Goyescas (Pieces Inspired by Goya) tell a little love story; Granados specified paintings for only two of the seven movements, but the work is a bit like Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It has hints of flamenco and other Spanish folk forms, and its glittering ornamentation brings to mind Domenico Scarlatti. However, the major influence is Liszt, and it is by appreciating this that Lasaracina manages to stand out from the crowd. Her technical equipment in this score, one of the most difficult in the entire piano repertory, is superb, yet it is her way with the improvisatory quality of the music that brings it alive. Her playing is charismatic even with no physical presence of the pianist involved. Listen to the fourth goyesca, “Quejas, ó La Maja y el ruiseñor” (“Complaints, or The Girl and the Nightingale”), for a scene that will unroll before the listener’s mind’s eye (and bring out the relationship to the song Bésame mucho besides). Lasaracina closes the program with the Allegro concierto, Op. 46, a showpiece work that resolves the Goyescas’ dreamlike atmosphere. The Dynamic label’s rather closed-in studio sound doesn’t fit the ambiance in which Granados, a great touring virtuoso, would have performed these pieces, but Lasaracina’s precision and power come through undisturbed. An entirely absorbing recording of these pieces.
Tracklist:
01. Goyescas, Op. 11 “Los majos enamorados”: I. Los requiebros
02. Goyescas, Op. 11 “Los majos enamorados”: II. Coloquio en la reja
03. Goyescas, Op. 11 “Los majos enamorados”: III. El fandango del candil
04. Goyescas, Op. 11 “Los majos enamorados”: IV. Quejas, o la maja y el ruiseñor
05. Goyescas, Op. 11 “Los majos enamorados”: V. El amor y la muerte
06. Goyescas, Op. 11 “Los majos enamorados”: VI. Epílogo (Serenata del espectro)
07. Goyescas, Op. 11 “Los majos enamorados”: VII. El pelele (Escena goyesca)
08. Allegro de concierto in C-Sharp Major, Op. 46
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