Granados: Orchestral Works, Vol. 2

Album review

This is one of a series of releases by the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra under Pablo González, exploring the orchestral music of Enrique Granados on the occasion of the centenary of his death on a ship torpedoed by a German submarine. Much of the material in the series qualifies as neglected compared with his music for piano, and one work here, La nit del mort, is receiving its world recording premiere. If you're after Iberian pictorial effects, be aware that they're here in only moderate abundance; Granados' musical nationalism developed only in stages, and La nit del mort, a work from 1897, contains few characteristically Spanish (or Catalan) details. It is, however, a wonderfully moody late Romantic tone poem with a concluding section for tenor and chorus, suggesting nicely what Wagner might have accomplished in smaller forms. Granados called it a "poem of desolation. Dante, Op. 21 is another tone poem, and one on the non-Iberian theme of the life of the great Italian poet. It falls into two beautifully contrasting movements: "Dante e Virgilio" and "Paolo e Francesca." For nationalist content you get the trio of short works at the beginning of the program, the well-known Intermezzo from the short opera Goyescas, and two orchestral dances. In these works, the Barcelona players seem to have an instinctive understanding of the music and are colorful without being garish in the least. But what's impressive is that this is also true in big, philosophical works that form the center of the program. Nothing here is quite as fetching as the Suite sobre Cantos Gallegos on the first album in this series, but this may nevertheless be recommended for anyone with the slightest interest in Granados.
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