Sunday 17 January 2010

Touching The Spanish Soul

In a recent BBC Radio 3 Building a Library feature, this disk was considered to be the pick of recordings of Manuel De Falla's El Amor Brujo. It is by the Orchestre Poitou-Charentes under the direction of Jean-Francois Heisser and it is a performance of the full masque, complete with dialogue and with the central part sung by flamenco artist Antonia Contreras, De Falla was a flamenco enthusiast who did much to ensure the continued health of that art form and it was always his intention that the work be performed in this way, albeit that he also arranged an orchestral suite and it is often sung with a regular soprano soloist. The recording quality is superb, the orchestra capture the idiom of the piece perfectly and the whole is wonderfully atmospheric. The disk comes with two substantial fillers. Heisser himself plays the piano piece Fantasia Baetica which owes an obvious debt to Debussy but which provides a perfect interlude between El Amor Brujo and a second masque, El Retablo de Maese Pedro which relates the trashing of an unfortunate entrepreneur's puppet show by a delusional Don Quixote. The sound world has similarities to El Amor Brujo but perhaps without the same memorable melodies and this time with standard operatic soloists in soprano Chantal Perraud, baritone Jerome Correas and tenor Eric Huchet.

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