Nani, nani

Nani, nani is the third of Rodrigo’s Cuatro Canciones sefardíes (Four Sephardic Songs) written on traditional texts in 1965 and dedicated to Jewish friends on their publication three years later. What attracted the composer, himself a Catholic, to these particular words must have been the special sound of the Ladino language, a mixture of fifteenth-century Spanish and Hebrew which has its own characteristic rhythms and exotic melodic and harmonic implications. Certainly, his setting of Nani, nani, the cradle-song in the set - with its hypnotically rocking repetitions in the left hand of the piano part and the elaborately decorative, freely inflected vocal line - has a melismatic quality quite different from that of any of his regular Spanish songs.