La Vega

Albéniz was an inveterate traveller. He spent so much of his life abroad, in fact, that it is difficult to work out how he managed to map out the distinctive musical regions of Spain as comprehensively as he did in Iberia and his several other piano collections. But if he wasted some of the time he spent away from Spain - as he surely did in England when he was working on a King Arthur operatic trilogy to a libretto by the London banker Francis Burdett Money-Coutts - he employed it wisely and creatively in Paris and he made particularly good use of it wherever he went in pursuit of Franz Liszt, with whom he studied for three years from 1880.

Because Albéniz’s music is so thoroughly steeped in the Spanish idiom, the Liszt influence is not readily apparent. This is one reasion why La Vega (“The Plain”), inspired by a visit to his favourite city of Granada and written in Paris in 1897, is so fascinating. One of the longest of his single-movement constructions, it not only has something of the exploratory quality of Liszt’s late piano pieces but it also seems to be in search of some kind of reconciliation between a piano style based on figurations natural to the guitar and one that derives from an essentially keyboard technique such as that developed by Chopin and Liszt.

The opening of La Vega is like the beginning of a guitar improvisation, the fingers brushing over a repeated preludial figure and then picking out against it the notes of what could be a flamenco lament. The basically two-part texture inevitably takes on more harmonic weight and more colour. As it does, a curiously Lisztian melodic fragment arises from the Spanish background and briefly asserts itself. But it is only in the next main section, where the melodic line is sustained across an impressive rolling accompaniment, that the acoustic image of the guitar is definitively replaced by that of the romantic piano. The emphasis continues to shift throughout the development, though usually in favour of the guitar, the supremacy of which is confirmed by the formal recall of the improvisatory opening section. The approach to the quiet ending is pure guitar.