Search - Manuel de Falla, Daniel Ligorio :: Falla: Piano Music 1

Pleasant Enough but He's No de Larrocha

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 02/08/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This CD is listed as Volume 1 and is apparently the first in a series of CDs in which Daniel Ligorio will record all of Falla's extant piano music, including juvenilia and his piano transcriptions of his orchestral works. Some of the works on this disc are indeed juvenilia and not terribly interesting as a result. They are not recognizably by Falla -- they could have been by any of half a dozen similarly educated young composers of the era -- and none of them has made it into the piano repertoire.



The most familiar and most important work recorded here is the suite Falla made from his orchestral 'El amor brujo' ('Love the Magician'). But pianist Ligorio has seen fit to alter Falla's own transcription in order to 'achieve an effect closer to that of the orchestral original.' This includes altering what Falla did with the 'infinite trill' in the Ritual Fire Dance. All this is well and good, but one wonders what Falla, himself an excellent pianist, would feel about it. Further, the original version by Falla is the one that Artur Rubinstein made such a staple of his own repertoire.



The other well-known works here are the 'Cuatro piezas españolas' ('Four Spanish Pieces'), originally written for piano and very much a part of the repertoire. No one has recorded them with the pizzazz that Alicia de Larrocha brought to them, and that includes the present version.



Ligorio's performances strike me as undercharacterized and just a bit bland in this quintessentially spicy branch of twentieth century piano music.



Scott Morrison

"