The final article in this survey of the recordings in the Victoria de los Ángeles: The Warner Classics Edition; Complete Recordings on His Master’s Voice & La Voix de son maître anthology accounts for music without any attributed composer. As might be expected, all of these songs have Spanish “roots.” However, for the most part, de los Ángeles tends to be more specific, associating each song with a particular region of the Iberian peninsula.
Thus, in the track listing for her Traditional Songs of Spain album, each song has a parenthetical geographical identification: Catalonia, Galicia, Asturias, Castile, Léon, Santander, Soria, Andalusia, Murcia, Granada, Majorca, and the Basque country. Regions such as Andalusia and Catalonia also have their own albums, but these tend to include composed works along with those of anonymous origin. For the most part the selections are accompanied by guitar; but there are also selections with orchestral arrangements (for which the arranger is not always identified).
Personally, I find these selections to be generally engaging, even if some of them are more “polished” than one might expect in a “folk” performance. Of more interest on my part are the opportunities to discover a tune that was subsequently appropriated by a composer often encountered in my concert listening experiences. As a result, I find myself more aware of the indigenous impact of this music on Spanish (and occasionally French) composers that I have been when listening to composers inspired by Eastern European sources, such as Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.
The tracks for this particular category may not draw as much of my attention as the operatic and vocal recital offerings, but they definitely have an impact on my listening experiences.
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