In 1893, Isaac Albéniz had long since stopped partying and had finally settled down. Settled in Paris, he enjoyed the sympathy of the Parisians and was a close friend of Dukas and Fauré. It was then that he stopped playing the piano in front of an audience. At the end of his life, he had composed a handful of interesting pieces, and a hundred or so pleasant and beautiful "salon pieces", but most of them today are forgotten. But in the last four years of his life, he devoted himself to work on a series of highly complex and significant piano pieces that assured him immortality. They were published in four notebooks under the title "Iberia".
Born in 1860 in a town in Catalonia, Isaac Albéniz made his debut as a pianist at the age of four. Three years later, he was writing his first compositions. With such an astonishing start, it should not be surprising that at the age of nine, he was playing for the audience of the Casino de El Escorial. The occasion arose from one of his typical escapades from the family home. He took a train in any direction, and on the way he met the manager of the Casino who, curious, invited him to play for his guests, but the next day the manager left him sitting on another train with the commitment to return home. Isaac left the train two stations further and took another one in the opposite direction.
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| Isaac Albéniz (1860 - 1909) |
It was the first of the great adventures of the child genius, the Spanish Rubinstein, as he would later be called. Three years after his foray to the Escorial, he hid on a ship and ended up playing in Puerto Rico. Similar escapades took him to Buenos Aires, Cuba, San Francisco, and New York.
Back in Europe
At the age of thirteen, he returned to Europe and took private lessons in Leipzig. Then a grant from the Spanish government allowed him to enter the Brussels Conservatory, which, as expected, he left soon after. In 1878 he got Liszt to listen to him. He was the teacher with whom he finished his formal studies. After that, it was all about success in half of Europe.
The Iberia Suite
The collection is made up of twelve pieces distributed in four notebooks with three pieces each. The complete work lasts about an hour and a half; each piece (except for the first one) describes a certain region of Spain, and hence its title (it could not be called Spain since there were two recent works with that title –one by Chabrier, from 1883).
The complete work is made up of the following pieces:
Cuaderno 1: Evocación - El Puerto - Corpus en Seville
Cuaderno 2: Rondeña - Almeria - Triana
Cuaderno 3: El Albaicín - El Polo - Lavapies
Cuaderno 4: Málaga - Jerez - Eritaña
Composed between 1904 and 1909 (the year of the composer's death), it is considered the most important work of Spanish piano literature. Enrique Granados did not spare the praise: "...I want everyone to play it, forgive me if many of you burst it, but this is a way to tell you that I like it with delirium", he wrote in a letter to Albéniz.
Suite Iberia - Book I - "Evocación" (Evocation)
Evocación is the first of the three pieces in Book I, a sort of introduction to the complete suite. It does not evoke, then, a particular Spanish region but rather delivers images of the peninsula in general.
Serene and tranquility in the outer sections, a passionate central piece provides the necessary contrast. A delicate exoticism permeates the work throughout.
The rendition is by Spanish pianist Luis Fernando Pérez.
