Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 03/27/2007, uploaded on 01/23/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

La Vega                    Isaac Albéniz

This is the first public performance of the original version of La Vega, which I discovered and edited while viewing the manuscript in Barcelona.  It is published by G. Henle Verlag.

Isaac Albéniz settled in Paris and began teaching piano and studying counterpoint with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum in 1896.  France's musical culture of the late nineteenth century fueled Albéniz's creativity. He continued to use the pan-folkloric Spanish idioms of his earlier salon works, but now developed those themes more thoroughly and with greater sophistication.

The composition that provides the clearest portal into this evolutionary period of Albéniz's musical style is La Vega.  The piece is similar to Evocación, the first movement of Iberia, Albeniz's set for piano from 1905. Both are written in the unique key of A-flat minor, and in a ternary meter. Although likely envisioned initially as part of a song cycle based on the poetry of his patron, F.B. Money-Coutts, and later conceived as a movement of an orchestral suite, La Vega was written in 1897 as a piano work.      Milton Rubén Laufer

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.