Chandos Records’ Spanish Music series (La Música de España) with the BBC Philharmonic and its Chief Conductor Juanjo Mena, a specialist in the repertoire, now reaches the music of Isaac Albéniz, one of the greatest Spanish composers of any era.

Highly colourful and subtly contrasted, the Suite española is perhaps the most interesting early anticipation of the great piano collection Iberia, composed about twenty years later, in which, as Debussy remarked, Albéniz ‘put the best of himself’. Brilliantly successful though he was as a pianist and composer of piano music, Albéniz also composed operas, having his first success with The Magic Opal, in London, three orchestral movements from which feature here.

The soloist in the Concierto fantástico is the British pianist Martin Roscoe, already highly praised for his many past recordings for Chandos, on which he features with artists such as Tasmin Little and Jennifer Pike.

Written at the same time as the Piano Concerto yet very different in style, Rapsodia española positively celebrates the Spanish idiom – all the more vividly in the orchestration by George Enescu, chosen for this recording. The piano soloist, again, is Martin Roscoe.

“The BBC Philharmonic under Juanjo Mena, finely recorded, play with a suitably heated, open-hearted commitment”.
“Martin Roscoe’s performances are of exceptional skill and affection”.
(Bryce Morrison, Gramophone Magazine)

See full track listings here

Impressive in Chandos’s ongoing, very successful Spanish music series, the BBC Philharmonic and its chief conductor, Juanjo Mena, also explores the works of the Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera in three orchestral volumes. Not only acknowledged as a leading South-American composer of his day, Ginastera is also seen as one of the heroes of Latin-American music in general, whose enduring source of inspiration was Argentina itself: its pre-Columbian legacy on the one hand and the vast landscapes of the pampas on the other.

Indeed, if Ollantay is inspired by the former, and more especially by a dramatic poem of Inca origin, Ginastera turned to the latter for the setting of his second ballet, Estancia, based on the life of the gauchos who work in those wide open spaces. The essential genre of music in this piece is the malambo, an exclusively masculine, competitive traditional dance, far from the seductive tangos of Ginastera’s now more famous compatriot and pupil Astor Piazzolla. While the landscape is the same in Pampeana No. 3, the music is more abstract and contrasted, marking the transition from what the composer called a compositional period of ‘objective nationalism’ to a ‘subjective one’.

This is the eagerly awaited second volume of orchestral works by Pierné, played by the BBC Philharmonic under Juanjo Mena and featuring Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. The first volume, released five years ago, proved ‘a delectable aperitif’ (American Record Review).

More successful than his older rival Debussy in the early twentieth century, the composer Pierné deserves to be better known nowadays. This recording features some of his most virtuosic and yet mysterious pieces, which place him at the frontier between romantic (Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Franck) and impressionist (Ravel, Debussy) influences.

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who is often praised for his expressive power and fine technique, here takes on the challenge of bringing such mercurial inventions as the Fantaisie-Ballet or Poème Symphonique to much-deserved recognition.

Les Cathédrales and Paysages franciscains are later works (1915 and 1919, respectively), and while the former evokes scenes of devastation during World War IMaría Espada (soprano), Martin Roscoe (piano), BBC Philharmonic, Juanjo Mena, the latter offers more airy and impressionist music, with obvious signs of ‘modern’ influences.