New Account of Complete Albéniz Piano Music

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this month, BIS Records released a nine-CD album of the complete piano music composed by Isaac Albéniz. Each of the CDs had been previously released as a “single,” which is similar to the approach that Naxos took in releasing its own set of nine CDs as a series of eight volumes. (The first volume consisted of two CDs to account for the entirety of the four books of the Iberia collection.) It took roughly two decades for Naxos to complete their project, drawing upon different pianists for different volumes. The BIS collection, on the other hand, provides a more unified approach to performance as defined by a single pianist, Miguel Baselga. However, it, too, emerged from single CDs released over the course of two decades.

I suspect that there is a general consensus that one collection of the complete piano music of Albéniz is sufficient. However, since I am a sucker for musicology, I was drawn to Baselga through his partnership with Jacinto Torres, an Albéniz scholar, who was able to provide access to original editions and scores. These included the composer’s two major works for piano and orchestra, the Opus 70 “Rapsodia española” and the Opus 78 three-movement concerto with the subtitle “Concerto fantástico” (fantasy concerto). Neither of these orchestral selections were included in the Naxos series, although that series did include the solo piano version of Opus 70. Baselga’s repertoire also includes three spontaneous improvisations that Albéniz recorded in 1903. These were transcribed by Milton R. Laufer and were published by G. Henle Verlag in 2010. It is also worth noting the inclusion of the “Marcha militar,” which Albéniz composed at the age of nine; but, to be fair, this is also included in the Naxos collection.

Albéniz died relatively young, just eleven days short of his 48th birthday. He was basically a contemporary of Claude Debussy and probably influenced Debussy’s own ventures into “Iberian idioms.” What may be more interesting is that Olivier Messiaen identified Albéniz (as well as Debussy) as a significant influence in his own early approaches to piano music. Ironically, almost all of my awareness of Albéniz piano music has been through either recordings or guitar recitals. According to my records, the last time I wrote about a pianist playing Albéniz was when Javier Perianes gave a solo recital for San Francisco Performances in May of 2017! At the risk of sounding too jaded, I have come to believe that the concert-going world would be in a better-balanced place if pianists served up a bit less of the music of Frédéric Chopin and a bit more Albéniz.