2 Canciones clásicas españolas (c.1920)

Del cabello más sutil (Dos cantares populares)

El vito

The absence of Fernando Obradors from the annals of the higher musicology - there is no mention of him even in the latest edition of The New Grove - is difficult to understand. Although he was a largely self-taught composer, he was by no means an amateur musician and, as the music director of orchestras in Barcelona and elsewhere, not exactly low-profile either. Of his orchestral works only the Poema de la Jungla seems to have any kind of prominence (in a recording by his former Orquesta Filarmonica de Gran Canaria) but his four volumes of songs with piano, the Canciones clásicas españolas, have always had their adherents. They are particularly attractive to those in search of material that is authentically idiomatic while avoiding, on the one hand, the aggressive sevillanismo of Joaquín Turina and, on the other hand, the neo-classical refinement of Obradors’s great Catalan predecessor Enrique Granados.

If Del cabello más sutil (put together from two different traditional sources) sounds a little like a Puccini vocal line set against the common currency of flowing arpeggios in the piano accompaniment, there is no mistaking the origin of El vito with its vigorously strummed guitar-style figuration in the piano introduction and interludes, its idiomatic dance rhythms and its provocative low-life sentiment.