Isaac ALBENIZ (1860 – 1909)
Complete Works for Voice and Piano
Chanson de Barberine (Barberine’s Song) (c. 1889) [2:20]
Deux Morceaus de prose (Two Prose Excerpts) (1898) [4:20]
Il est l’amour (Love is like so many things) (1897) [2:33]
To Nellie (1896) [12:27]
Six Songs (1896 – 1903) [14:15]
Quatre Mélodies (Four Songs) (1908 -09) [14:21]
Seis baladas (Six Italian Songs) [15:18]
Rimas de Bécquer (Poems by Bécquer) (1888) [6:17]
Magdalena Llamas (mezzo-soprano)
Guillermo González (piano)
rec. 2018, Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain
Sung texts and translations online
NAXOS 8.574072 [72:46]
Isaac Albéniz was widely travelled. Born in Camprodon, province of Girona in Spain he was a child prodigy who first performed when he was four. When he was seven he passed the entrance examination for piano at the Conservatoire de Paris, but he wasn’t allowed to start because he was too young. At nine his concert career began when he and his sister together with their father toured Spain and later he toured abroad. When he was 15 he had already given concerts worldwide. He studied for some time in Leipzig and Brussels and went to Budapest to meet Liszt, only to find that the old master was in Weimar. During the 1890s he lived in London and Paris and he died from a kidney disease in Cambo-les-Bains, in Labourd, in south-west France.
This cosmopolitan life is also mirrored in his choice of texts for his songs. The first four in this complete collection of his songs for voice and piano are in French, the following three groups, a total of 16, are in English, the next six are in Italian and only the five Bécquer songs are in Spanish. The English poems are all by Francis Burdett Money-Coutts, whose patronage allowed him to devote himself to composition fulltime. Though he was a prolific composer lots of his oeuvre have been lost, and even though he wrote some orchestral works and a couple of operas it is mainly his piano compositions that have survived. The late Iberia is probably his most important work. Also in these songs it is easy to realise that the piano writing was important. Both harmonically and structurally the accompaniments are of great interest and almost relegates the vocal line to the background. On this recording the balance boosts the piano to the detriment of the voice, which in this case isn’t as bad as it seems. Guillermo González is an eminent pianist and also an Albéniz scholar and has recently been involved in a recording of the complete piano works of Albéniz. Unfortunately the piano tone isn’t too flattering. It’s rather hard and blaring. Even more unfortunate is the singing of Magdalena Llamas. I hadn’t heard her before but according to the bio in the booklet she has trained at the Juilliard School in opera, won First Prize in numerous competitions, studied with famous singers like Fedora Barbieri, Sharon Sweet, Jessye Norman and Shirley Verrett, and appeared at Carnegie Hall, The Metropolitan Opera and several other prestigious institutions and under prominent conductors. It is therefore with sadness I have to report that her singing on this disc gave me practically no enjoyment at all. An over-generous vibrato that more often than not develops to a wobble, a strident tone, especially in the upper register, which at forte becomes more shouting than singing, exaggerated portamenti, that once may have been described as ‘sensuality’ but now is just a matter of sliding up and down without purpose – all these things combine to make this disc unpalatable. During more than fifteen years of reviewing for Musicweb
International I have tried to find some redeeming feature in bad recordings, but not here. I feel sorry for Guillermo González, whose playing is excellent, but the singing makes this an unnecessary disc. It shouldn’t have been issued at all.
Göran Forsling
