Joaquín Achúcarro, piano

Isaac Albéniz: Sevilla / Evocación-El puerto-El Albaicín (from Iberia) / Tango / Navarra / Maurice Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales / Ondine – Le Gibet – Scarbo (from Gaspard de la nuit)

When Isaac Albéniz died in 1909 at Cambo-les-Bains in Aquitaine, 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.

In January that same year, the Lleida pianist Ricard Viñes gave the first performance of the triptych Gaspard de la nuit, an overtly anti-romantic work of significant symbolist content 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. In this piece, the composer explores in depth the world of the waltz, with which he had already experimented in 1906, in his impressive orchestral work La Valse.

Joaquín Achúcarro will illustrate these two visions of what is modern in music, in a recital dedicated as a tribute to Albéniz, one of the greatest figures of our musical heritage.