Joaquín Achúcarro

Joaquín Achúcarro, piano

PROGRAMME

I. Albéniz: Sevilla / Evocación – El puerto – El Albaicín (d'Ibèria) / Tango / Navarra / M. Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales / Ondine – Le gibet – Scarbo (de Gaspard de la nuit)

When Isaac Albéniz died in 1909, he left a magnificent musical legacy for posterity – his masterwork Iberia. In this work, the precepts of the nationalist movement, and to some extent those of romanticism, move on to a clearly more modern idiom in which nostalgia for the Iberian Peninsula, the land of the composer's birth, is expressed in a musical language clearly influenced by the discoveries of the impressionists. That same year, the Lleida pianist Ricard Viñes gave the first performance of the triptych Gaspard de la nuit, an overtly anti-romantic work which depicts the atmosphere of the literary works of Aloysius Bertrand. Some two years later, the pianist Louis Albert gave the first performance of the Valses nobles et sentimentales, one of Ravel's most important works for the piano.