Tres Poemas, Op.81

Olas gigantes

Tu pupila es azul

Bese el aura

When Albéniz advised Turina to turn to Spanish folk music for his material, the younger composer was probably not altogether pleased. As a pupil of Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris - where he had been instructed in the worship of César Franck and the virtues of cyclic form - he had had just taken part in the first performance of his Piano Quintet, Op.1, and this would not have been the kind of advice he wanted to hear. Albéniz was right, however. Although Turina retained his ambition to write works in the conventional major forms, the Andalusian in him was asserting itself in his piano and chamber music even before his departure from the Schola Cantorum and his return to Spain in 1914.

The earliest of Turina’s songs, beginning in 1914 with Rima, Op.6, to words by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, are in a comparatively simple folk-song style. The Tres poemas, Op.81, written twenty years later to words by the same poet, do not exclude the composer’s characteristic “sevillanismo” even though he had by then achieved such academic distinction as to be appointed Professor of Composition at the Madrid Conservatory. The first of them - a setting of a poem inspired by the unhapy love affair which was the central experience of Bécquer’s short life - is concerned at first with reflecting the turbulence of the poet’s imagery in its sophisticated harmonies and its impulsive rhythms. Its slow last stanza, on the other hand, is not too distant echo of an Andalusian lament. Tu pupila es azul - although, paradoxically, the text is based on Byron’s “I saw thee weep” - is thoroughly Spanish both in the guitar figuration of the accompaniment and the shape of the vocal line, not least the flamenco cadenza at the end. Besa el aura is similarly coloured, and more brilliantly, until the tempo broadens for a conclusively cyclical allusion to Olas gigantes in the final bars.

Gerald Larner©