GRANADOS: Goyescas – Suite, Op. 11; Danzas espanolas: No. 2 “Oriental”; No. 5 “Andaluza” – Charlotte Hu, piano – Pentatone PTC 5187 522 (3/19/26) (63:41) [distributed by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music] ****:
In 1955, Amparo Iturbi recorded for RCA (LM 1925) the Goyescas (1911) by Enrique Granados, initiating many into the beauties of Spain’s most successful and adventurous piano music. Charlotte Hu (rec. 18-20 October 2025) now explores this versatile and virtuosic suite, a dazzling series of contemplations on the paintings of Francisco Goya (1746-1828), the printmaker and engraver often credited as the first modern artist. Besides brilliant technique and stamina, Granados’ suite calls for poetic insight, the ability to shade poignant drama and quiet intimacy, a capacity to maintain the piano’s lyric, singing power in storytelling, while releasing a torrent of color nuances.
Various Spanish nobility appear in the early works of Goya, and these personages as arranged by Granados assume a continuity of sorts, by the sequence of the titles. The “emotional narrative” opens with Los requiebros, a series of flirtations and dance gestures. The nobles carry on their intimations of youthful ardor – behind coy fans – to the accompaniment of guitars or mandolins. The glistening filigree proves both ornamental and organic, in the manner of the Schumann dances in Carnaval. One couple becomes the focus of the courtly scene in Coloquio en la Reja, conversation at the window, a true love-duet a la Tristan und Isolde. The Spanish night invites a sensuous nocturne from Granados, chromatically voluptuous. Hu’s keyboard has become ardently expressive, the swelling scalar passages and arpeggios rife with passionate caresses and artful promises.
El Fandango del Candil offers a staccato study whose persistent pulse could devolve into overwrought percussion. At night, on the outskirts of Madrid, an inner courtyard shines ablaze with flaming lights while musicians improvise a fandango for dancers touched by candlelight. Hu varies her biting touches and shades her rhythms in order to preserve our aesthetic interest, if not our impulse to join the couples. Among the most famous selections of the suite, Quejas o la Maja y el Ruisenor, the Maiden and the Nightingale, assumes an intimate, subjective personality, an extended nocturne set in F# minor. A young girl sits on a balcony, where at her window she daydreams. When a nightingale alights on her hand, the young girl addresses the bird as a confessor or counselor, seeking solace in Natural wisdom. Dream and melancholy blend in a ravishing assortment of colors. Schumann’s Prophet Bird must be a near cousin, as well as the water pieces by Debussy and Ravel.
The dramatic depth of the suite lies in the fifth section, El Amor y la Muerte. Balada. The age-old confrontation of Love and Death unfolds The desire for Love to persist in spite of and beyond Death has all the transcendent possibilities of the keyboard at its disposal. Quite conceived in a Lisztian manner, the dark piece allows flickers of light intermittently throughout evolution. Highly chromatic in shifting registers, the piece will move to a concluding G minor, where Granados inscribed the words, “the death of the young man.” Besides invoking Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, the colored chord progressions seem saturated with both Schumann and Franck, the style of presentation close to that of Fauré. The writing for the hand, knotty and demanding, adds to the affective, lugubrious anguish of the moment. Somehow, the wistfulness of the coda assures us that Love will prevail.
Granados adds a final chapter with the mysterious title Epilogo, Serenata del Espectro, a highly stylized stately dance, a spectral procession that recalls impulses from previous moments, a last gasp to preserve what must dissolve in the face of reality. Syncopations and modal chords mark the dance, eminently Spanish in character, the music’s often heaving in emotional punctuations while also musing meditatively in flowery arabesques.
Hu concludes her program with two of Granados’ 1890 Spanish Dances: the minor key Oriental proceeds in delicate gestures; in 36 measures, it presents in slow ¾ a moment of imaginative reverie that extends itself into an otherwise lonely landscape. The musical effect approaches that of luxurious chimes accompanied by bell tones. Introspective and intimate, the dance leaves a sense of haunted melancholy behind. The ever-popular No. 5 Andaluza, optimally adjusted – though the piano claims the original conception – to the unique qualities of the guitar, as Andrés Segovia fans well recall. Immensely passionate, the piece appeals to the sense of Spanish soil and folk wisdom inextricable to the soul of the music, no less palpable in the music of Albeniz and Falla.
The excellent piano sound owes debts to producer and engineer Everett Porter.
—Gary Lemco
