Manuel de Falla: 7 Canciones populares Espanolas – Estrella Morente

   in Piano International (Mar, 2017)
Much of the best-known Spanish music was written by foreign hands – Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio, Ravel’s and Chabrier’s Rhapsodies, Debussy’s Ibéria – so it’s a good to come back to Spanish music by Spanish composers. Falla remains the Spanish composer par excellence and the tunes of his Seven Popular Spanish Songs (1914) are so well known from their various chamber and orchestral arrangements (there’s even one by Luciano Berio) that one sometimes forgets they originated for voice and piano. They remain an object lesson not only in how to integrate folk material into art song but in the much-overworked (and often overlooked) concept ‘less is more’. Falla’s accompaniments are enormously expressive, …