<<  -- 2 --  Bill Newman    PIANO EXOTICA

Joaquin Turina (1882-1949), following lessons with Moszkowski (piano) and d'Indy (composition), based his 3-movement Sevilla - a 'suite pintoresca' (1909), on French cyclic forms. Outgoing, free-ranging, highly-coloured, you can almost smell the orange blossoms in the first, while Tres danzas andaluzas (1912) transforms into swirling, light-textured dancers with repeated 'guitar' pluckings, a stately tango and a playful resumé with scene changes.

A Mediterranean tour in 1916 combined pleasurable sightseeing with descriptive recall - Retrato, El casino de Algeciras, Gibraltar (playing riot with 'God Save the King') [listen - CD2 track 14 , 0:02-1:02], Paseo nocturno, Fiesta mora en Tanger (Album de viaje). Like today's video enthusiast, range and aperture widened for boldly-harmonised chords, thirds, fifths, occasional tenths, decorative trills, interspersed cadenzas in Sancular de Barrameda (En la torre del castillo, Siluetas de la Calza, La playa - Los pascadores en Bajo de Guia ,1922), the 'portrait' series Mujeres espanolas (1917/32), a 3-section poem El castillo de Almodóvar (1931), and two sets of Cinco danzas gitanas (1930/34) where seduction, ritual and invocation all interplay.

Federico Mompou (1893-1987) is quite the reverse: 'My only desire is to write works in which nothing is missing and nothing is superfluous ... some colleagues cannot understand ... to me, there is only my form and my concept.' Impressiones intimas (1911-14) - 9 miniatures denoting a love of Fauré's music, includes sorrow for a caged linnet -Pájaro triste, [listen - CD4, track 5, 0:00-1:01], and a cradle-song of distilled emotions - Cuna .

Continue >>

To listen to the aural illustrations in this review, you may need to download RealNetworks' realplayer G2.