Classical Spanish Songs

Maria Dolores Campos (soprano)
&
Katharine Durran (piano)

 

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Maria Dolores Campos


The music presented on this disc is romantic and colourful, strongly identified as representing the quintessence of Spain.

The songs were all composed during the first half of the twentieth century. Each song gives a vivid glimpse of scenes from everyday life.

Maria Dolores Campos is from Vallodolid in Central Spain, and her delightful, authoritative Spanish personality shines through in these performances.

Oscar Esplá's Canciones playeras are fishermen's songs based on the music of Alicante, but using a musical scale of Esplá's own design. They provide an arresting opening to this collection, being the first recording made with piano (rather than orchestral) accompaniment. Listeners familiar with Victoria de los Angeles's recording with orchestra may well appreciate the heightened clarity and rhythmic vitality which the piano writing allows.

The lively songs of Fernando Obrador's Canciones clásicas españolas, are justly well-known and well-loved, providing the perfect foil to Frederic Mompou's understated and serenely beautiful trilogy Combat de Somni.

Manuel de Falla (who was to Spanish Twentieth Century music as Bartok and Kodály were to Hungarian) is here represented by three folksongs from his Siete conciones populares españolas (El paño moruno, Asturiana and Polo).

The set of eight Tonadillas, chosen from Enrique Granados's great collection depicting the colourful, happy-go-lucky lives of Madrid artisans opens with La maja de Goya, famous for its extended opening 'recitation' on the piano.

Joaquín Turina's Poema en forma de canciones also opens with a piano solo : the flamboyant Dedicatoria. The four songs which conclude this Spanish 'melting pot' of a song collection are unashamedly heart-on-sleeve and extrovertly sentimental !

The Poetry

The texts set by Obradors and de Falla are traditional Spanish folk material. Fernando Periquet (1873-1940), who provided Granados with the folk-based texts for his Tonadillas, was also the librettist for Granados's opera Goyescas. The life of Ramón de Campoamor (1817-1901) (poems set by Turina) can be roughly paralleled with that of Victor Hugo in France - he wrote long philosophical poems as well as being a politician and sometime governor of Alicante and Valencia! The Catalan poet Josep Janés (1913-59) (set by Mompou) was also a Barcelona publisher; the Andalusian poet Raphael Alberti (b.1902) (set by Esplá) originally wished for a life as a painter, but achieved fame in 1925 for his verses Marinero en tierra.

 


Katharine Durran


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Katharine Durran

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