De España vengo (El Niño juido)

De España vengo is everything you have always wanted from zarzuela and have rarely, unless you have been very lucky, actually found. Little else from Pablo Luna’s not far short of two hundred stage works has made it into the international recital repertoire but this delightful number from El Niño juido (“The Jewish Child”), a two-act zarzuela to a libretto by Paso and Garcia Alvarez first performed in Madrid in 1918, has it all - or all of its kind at least. It has a teasingly long instrumental introduction, a brilliantly agile Spanish dance for its outer sections, an engagingly sentimental middle section and vocal writing as effective in one mood as it is in the other.