6 Canciones clásicas españolas (c1920)

La mi sola, Laureola

Al amor

Corazón porqué pasáis

Con amores, la mi madre

Del cabello más sutil

Chiquitita la novia

The absence of Fernando Obradors from the annals of the higher musicology - there is no mention of him in The New Grove for example - is baffling. Although he was largely self-taught as a 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 currency (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 Spanish in idiom while avoiding at one extreme the aggressive sevillanismo of, say, Joaquín Turina and at the other 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 imtiative 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. The exception is Con amores, la mia madre, where the piano not only indulges the sentimental lover but also restricts its participation to a gently rocking accompaniment.

If Del cabello más sutil 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 another traditional song, Chiquittita la novia. Beginning and ending with vigorous seguidilla rhythms in exuberantly bitonal harmonies in the piano part, Chiquitita offers an authentically flamenco-style vocalise to the singer and, to compensate for twice being reduced to a strummed ostinato accompaniment, a delightfully elegant central episode to the pianist.