Goyescas

In his booklet essay, Jean-François Dichamp explains that he experienced an epiphany with Goyescas: while Granados himself later reworked his piano cycle into an opera, first premiered to acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera House, just a couple of months before the composer's untimely death by drowning, the pianist sees the piano cycle as a through-written dramatic work in it's own right: an opera for piano. He plays it accordingly, with tremendous fire and awareness of the voices which may be heard in pieces such as 'The Maiden and the Nightingale'. This is the lyric heart of a cycle which opens with the courtly insinuations of 'Galant Compliments' and soon progresses to a more ardent love duet, 'Conversation at the Window'. Finally, as so often in Spanish music, death has the last word, and the cycle closes with the Serenade to a Ghost: comical yet chilling, unnerving and quintessentially Spanish. Between each section of the Goyescas, like intermezzi at the opera, Dichamp places a Baroque keyboard sonata, by Scarlatti and Soler. This is the music that would have accompanied aristocratic evenings for the nobles who were immortalized - not always in complimentary terms - by Goya. These are the paintings that changed the course of Granados's career when he first saw them as a young man in the Prado museum in Madrid, and determined that one day he would pay homage to Goya's muse in music. Jean-François Dichamp graduated from the Paris Conservatoire and became a pupil of Nikita Magaloff. His recordings have long attracted critical praise: 'A pianist of great delicacy, subtle and elegant' (Le Monde de la Musique); 'his Chopin is at once thorough and profound' (Diapason).