Danses andalouses

Ritmo

Sentimiento

Gracia (El vito)

Although he cut himself off from his Spanish roots when he settled in Paris in his mid-twenties, Manuel Infante never rejected the musical inheritance of his early years in Andalusia and his studies with Enrique Morera (himself a pupil of Isaac Albéniz) in Barcelona. On the contrary, he made a speciality of it. As a pianist, composer and conductor he became a popular representative of Spanish music in a city which, over the last few decades, had developed a pronounced taste for it – not least through the magic of Albéniz’s monumental collection of piano pieces in Iberia. He seems to have been most successful in the 1920s when his music was adopted by the Spanish pianist José Iturbi, who played it wherever his concert tours took him.

Infante was no Albéniz: he had neither the vision nor the originality for that. He did learn from Albéniz, however, the art of translating into effective piano terms not only the rhythms and melodies of Spanish folk song but also the sounds associated with it – the guitar-strumming, the hand-clapping, the heel-tapping, the vocal interjections. The Danses andalouses, written for the two-piano partnership of José Iturbi and his sister Amparo in 1921, offer a particularly impressive example. As the title suggests, the first piece, Ritmo, is a lively celebration of flamenco dance rhythm but it also includes, in a quieter middle section, echoes of the cante jondo before the dance resumes in a brilliantly wrought texture of tuneful counterpoint and glitteringly decorative colouring. The dramatically scored Sentimiento reverses the situation: mainly an evocation of passionately uttered song, it interpolates (after a short pause) a vigorous dance episode in the second half of the piece. The Madrid street song El vito seems to have a special fascination for Infante. Having given it brief but spectacular treatment in Gracia, the last of the Danses andalouses, he wrote a series of six solo-piano variations on it for Iturbi a year later.