5 Canciones clásicas españolas (c.1920)

La mi sola Laureola

Al Amor

Corazon porqué pasáis

El majo celoso

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 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 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.

La mi sola, Laureola    is as near as Obradors gets to Granados. The piano seems to be reluctant to go along with the self-indulgence of the adoring lover, twice running off in imitative counterpoint with a brisk variant of the dreamy melody introduced by the unaccompanied voice. It does, however, lend solid, slightly archaic harmonic support in the chorale-like middle section. Al Amor, like most of the other songs in this group, is closer to the Spanish folk idiom, although the piano again goes its own way, this time in an exuberant solo episode in the middle. An accomplished pianist himself, Obradors was resourceful in writing entertaining piano parts even when, as in the rhythmically intriguing Corazón, porqué pasáis, they derive much of their colouring from guitar figuration. El majo celoso is a touching little study in characterisation: light-hearted though the piano part tells us she is and though liable, it seems, to mock the sighs of her jealous lover, she turns out in the second stanza to be just as sentimental as he is, and in the same melodic terms. There is nothing sentimental about El vito, an authentic glimpse of urban low life in the vigorously strummed guitar-style figuration of the piano introduction and interludes and the thoroughly idiomatic dance rhythms.