COMPOSERS: Buchardo,Falla,Ginastera,Granados & Montsalvatage,Guastavino
LABELS: ECM
WORKS: Songs by Buchardo, Guastavino, Ginastera, Falla, Granados & Montsalvatage
PERFORMER: Kim Kashkashian (viola), Robert Levin (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: 476 6149
It looks like a standard song recital, yet it’s played on the viola.
Three of somebody’s favourite tracks appear twice scattered through the disc, including the opening excerpt from Falla’s Seven Popular Songs, which turns up later in its usual context to hypnotic effect: slower than would be singable, and so contemplative that it sounds like Arvo Pärt.
The sense of concentration, with minute inflections of line and timbre in which the pianist is caught up too, continues into the ensuing Granados set.
While the Montsalvatge songs, from his Canciones negras, are nearly as familiar as the other Spanish, there are also some less familiar items.
Gustavino’s wondrous ‘La rosa y el sauce’, full of haunting sequences like a Latin version of Rachmaninov’s ‘Vocalise’, well deserving its encore; then the final ‘Oye mi llanto’ by Buchardo, broad, frank, sorrowful, appearing once but destined to be replayed immediately. Robert Maycock