Iberia – Book 1

There are a few Catalan inspirations among Albéniz’s earlier orchestral and piano pieces but when he came to write his last great tribute to Spain in the four books of Iberia he turned almost exclusively to Andalusia for his material. For Albeniz, as for Falla and Turina after him, the flamenco or cante hondo element in the folk music of Andalusia made it much more interesting than that of the other Spanish regions.

As an evocation of the spirit of Spanish music rather than an allusion to one particular place, the introductory Evocación is more generalised in its local colouring than the other pieces in the collection. The essential quality of the nostalgic, reputedly Basque melody that opens the piece is not its regional associations but the dreamily impressionistic harmonies in which it is set and developed. The expressive second subject, which rises in the left hand under arpeggios in the right, is rather more specific in the unmistakably flamenco-style decoration of its cadences.

The port referred to in El Puerto has been identified as Santa Maria on the Bay of Cádiz. Albéniz recalls the atmosphere of the place with a polo, an animated dance in 6/8 time. A more expressive melody is introduced low in the left hand but, although it is developed alongside the opening theme, it has little part to play in the last section of the piece, which joyously recalls the polo tune before taking a lingering farewell of it.

El Corpus en Sevilla is outstanding among the twelve “impressions” not only because it is the one programmatic piece in the collection but also because it is so startlingly visionary in its inspiration. Based on a memory of a Corpus Christi celebration in Seville, it is a direct anticipation of the expressions of religious fervour Olivier Messiaen was to present in similarly extreme keyboard terms thirty or forty years later. The Corpus Christi procession begins in the distance with muffled drum rolls and gets gradually nearer and louder as the minor-key march that accompanies it accumulates more and more harmonic and textural interest. At its ffff climax it explodes into the major with a dazzlingly radiant variant of the march tune and a chorale melody sustained in heavy left-hand octaves beneath it. After a quiet middle section, a compressed recapitulation of the first part, with the volume now screwed up to fffff on the entry of the chorale, is followed by a brilliant contrapuntal treatment of the march tune. A lingering Andante postlude echoes with fragments of cante hondo melody and scarcely perceptible bells.