Katarzyna Musiał Surveys Five Spanish Composers

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

According to my records, it has been almost five years since I last wrote about Polish-Canadian pianist Katarzyna Musiał. That would have been back when I was writing for Examiner.com, producing an account that now “belongs to the ages.” At the beginning of this year, the Polish Dux label released a new recording of her solo performances; and I feel more than a little sheepish about another uncalled-for lapse of time. The title of the new album is My Spanish Heart; and, like the last album I discussed, Come Dance With Me, it is a survey of offerings all organized around a common theme.

My Spanish Heart focuses on music composed during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. It is structured around selections by five composers. In “order of appearance” these are Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados, Joaquín Turina, Federico Mompou, and Manuel de Falla.

The Falla selections are taken from two of his ballet scores, “The Three-Cornered Hat” and “El amor brujo” (love, the magician); but the piano versions of these pieces were all prepared by Falla himself. In the current political climate, I suspect there are many who would prefer to describe Mompou as Catalan; and, to be fair, I am one of them. Nevertheless, I welcomed his appearance on this recording, even if he is not, strictly speaking, Spanish.

To be fair, I approached My Spanish Heart with much more familiarity of the repertoire than I had done with Come Dance With Me. Indeed, one of the things that drew me to the earlier recording was the presence of two of Mompou’s “Cançó i dansa” (song and dance) compositions. These were the first and sixth from a collection of fifteen (the last being written for organ, rather than piano); and I was delighted to encounter them again on My Spanish Heart, this time in the company of the second and fifth of the pieces. I was equally pleased to see that the track listing took the trouble to identify the original sources for the first two pairings in the collection, information that had not been included on my sheet music copies but which can easily be found on the Wikipedia page for this collection.

I also welcomed the fact that the booklet notes by Agnieszka Jeż shared one of my favorite Falla anecdotes. This concerned the “Danza ritual del fuego” (ritual fire dance) from “El amor brujo.” Apparently, after seeing the ballet, Arthur Rubinstein was so impressed with this episode that he asked Falla for a piano version. Falla provided one but doubted that a piano solo could have the same impact as the orchestral score. The selection turned out to be one of Rubinstein’s favorite encore choices, always greeted with enthusiastic audience applause!

Indeed, Rubinstein’s interest in Spanish composers whose music was popular in his own time can be found in the impact of that interest on his recording sessions with RCA. The limited edition Rubinstein Collection, which documents all of his RCA recording sessions, has a Music of Spain CD, which accounts for all of the composers surveyed by Musiał except for Turina. Indeed, one will find Rubinstein’s interpretations of two of the Albéniz selections, one of the Granados pieces, two of the Mompou “Cançó i dansa” compositions, and all of the Falla selections. This is not to suggest that Musiał was trying to compete with Rubinstein. Instead, I view this new recording as her effort to demonstrate that works that enjoyed considerable popularity during the last century still deserve it during this one.

Nevertheless, I do not think My Spanish Heart should be dismissed as a selection on “encore hits.” Indeed, assuming that Musiał was not trying explicitly to follow in Rubinstein’s footsteps (which I fell is a legitimate assumption), preparing the overall “program” must have been a bit of a challenge, since all of the composers were so prolific in their output. As a result the greatest virtue of the album is the balanced fairness that guided Musiał’s overall programming. No composer overstays his respective welcome, and Musiał’s interpretations go a long way to finding the appropriate “voice” behind each composer’s rhetorical strategies. Those who have followed my writing for some time probably know that, where recordings are concerned, I tend to prefer “deep dives” into the works of a single composer. Nevertheless, Musiał’s “programming skills” are sufficiently perceptive that I am likely to return to this new recording many times.