Javier Perianes is still in touch with his first piano teacher, Julia Hierro, whom he calls ‘Julita’. She is a nun, now 94 years old. ‘I still speak with her for an hour before every concert, unless I’m somewhere the time difference is too huge,’ the Spanish pianist says. ‘She’ll ask, “What are you playing today?”, and if I say, “Brahms’s First Concerto” she will reply, “Then I will pray for you a little bit extra, because it’s a long concerto!” It’s a very special relationship. I appreciate having this sense of a “hook in the earth” – someone I have known since I was a child, with whom I can still share everything in my musical life.’

Perianes is talking to me on a video call from Seville, where he lives with his wife, Lidia, also a pianist and a teacher. This historic Spanish city has the distinction of also being home to such timeless fictional characters as Carmen, Don Giovanni, the Almaviva family and, of course, Figaro himself. Perianes is a realist with his feet firmly on the ground, yet to judge from the poetic beauty in his playing, his head may also reach the clouds. Not for nothing did The Guardian describe him as ‘a player of great elegance and understated flamboyance’, with praise for his ‘exquisite grace and wonderful lightness of touch’.

Perianes’s repertoire encompasses Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn – his recording of the Songs without Words is a complete joy – and inevitably plenty of Spanish music, ranging from an album of Falla with the Flamenco singer Estrella Morente to his latest project, the complete Goyescas by Enrique Granados, which is just out on the Harmonia Mundi label. It is a hefty task: a cycle of six virtuoso pieces variously shot through with the atmosphere of sultry Mediterranean nights, traditional Spanish dances, a soupçon of flamenco’s fiery intensity and a generous, discursively improvisatory quality. Each is a vignette in its own right, while an overarching story traces the development of the relationship between the Majo and the Maja, her dialogue with a nightingale (probably the set’s most celebrated piece) and the death of the Majo.

While Goyescas was inspired by the drawings and paintings of Francisco Goya, specific artworks have mostly not been identified to match the pieces, with the exception of ‘El amor y la muerte’ (Love and Death). Nevertheless, Granados declared himself ‘enamoured with the psychology of Goya, with his palette, with him, with his muse the Duchess of Alba, with his quarrels with his models, his loves and flatteries. That whitish pink of the cheeks, contrasting with the blend of black velvet; those subterranean creatures, hands of mother-of-pearl and jasmine resting on jet trinkets, have possessed me.’

‘When Harmonia Mundi asked me three or four years ago if I would record Goyescas, I was reluctant at first,’ Perianes says. Why? ‘Because it was Alicia de Larrocha’s! But then I realised that if I had that feeling, I also could not record Chopin, Schumann, Brahms or Beethoven, because there are already so many great recordings. So why not show what I think about this piece and the conception of it?

‘We think of Granados as a wonderful improvisatory musician. But also it was very tempting to feel that there is a whole big, beautiful structure that belongs to Goyescas: in a dramatic and even a harmonic way, we go from the very clear first piece,“Los requiebros” (The Compliments) in B flat major, to “Epílogo: Serenata del espectro” (Epilogue: Serenade of the Spectre),where there is more or less no tonality. The influence of Spanish folklore is only in two pieces, “Los requiebros” and “Quejas”, where he clearly used the kind of melody he would have found in the streets. Everything else is purely his own.’

Perianes describes the set as the ‘Everest’ of Granados. ‘He wrote nothing else on this brutal level of technical complexity, either before or after. As for its challenges, first of all, it’s a question of how to make everything make sense even when you feel clearly that he is improvising. How do you convey to the audience that this piece has some structure, but it’s not as obvious as it would be in Albéniz or de Falla? How do you make sense of the whole, without cutting up this amazing music into small, improvisatory passages? That was for me the most challenging thing when I was working on it.’

He continues: ‘The first piece, “Los requiebros”, is a set of variations, all the time with different registers, different hands, different techniques, and you have to integrate that difficulty. Success, for me, is when people don’t perceive that it is difficult, but think I am enjoying it. Next, the sound, in my opinion, must be a beautiful mix of bravura and at the same time a classy type of elegance. Compared to Albéniz, it has a different colour, a different perception, even a different conception of sound.’

The opera of the same title that Granados created after the piano suite, he says, is not necessarily a strong reference point: ‘Although the orchestration is good and you can find plenty of colours and ideas there, I think this is an eminently pianistic piece. Overall, I find the opera less interesting than the piano suite, which to me is Granados’s masterpiece.’

Perianes performed the set between 20 and 30 times before he felt ready to commit it to disc. ‘Often pianists make a recording, then tour with the piece to promote it. I did the opposite,’ he says. ‘We made the recording in two days in Saragossa, which has a wonderful auditorium – the acoustic is a miracle, so easy and so natural.’ He felt that Goyescas would be best captured in long takes. ‘I decided to play “Los requiebros” through three or four times, after which the producer would tell me if he’d got everything we needed. Then if there was some small detail to correct, we could patch it. It was quite exhausting, because these are long pieces, but if we were to do it by sections, it would not make any sense. There would be no connection, no unity, no breathing through the piece. I think this way of recording represents me better than the other option.’ Long term, he reflects, the recording is a ‘postcard’. ‘It’s like a picture of me at 44 years old, recording the piece in this moment in those few days. Six months later, I was already playing many things in it differently.’

Perianes was born in the village of Nerva, not far from Seville, the son of a technician in the mines of Rio Tinto. Starting to play the piano, he says, was ‘a beautiful coincidence, like so many things in life. The village, with only about 5000 people, had a big band and they needed to find some new child musicians to play in it. ‘According to my parents, I was at seven or eight a very nervous child, interested in many things, but not very easy to handle. Then a local lady came to the house and said they were looking for musicians.’ The family duly decided that he should learn the clarinet.

‘Next, they tried taking me to a concert at Rio Tinto. My mother thought I would never sit there for an hour or two and listen, but I did, so they thought this might be the solution to all their problems! We were about to buy a clarinet, but while we were on holiday, my aunt, who played the piano, wanted me to hear how that sounded. We went into a big hotel where there was a piano in the breakfast room. They let her play it for me. And I thought: this is like an orchestra – I love it, I want to play the piano! That was the beginning of everything.’

There was no specific moment at which he made up his mind to become a professional musician. ‘When people ask me that, I always say the same thing: I am still thinking about it,’ he jokes. ‘One step leads me to the next one. Here I am, sharing the music that I love with the audience, with family, friends and everyone. But curiously enough, when I’m playing with orchestras, the first thing I do when I’m in place is to look left, towards the clarinettist. I don’t know why, but maybe I’m thinking I could have been there.’

His studies developed quickly, taking him successively from Huelva to Seville to Madrid. One of his most important teachers was Josep Colom; he also took part in masterclasses with Daniel Barenboim, Richard Goode and Alicia de Larrocha. Keen YouTubers can still view the occasion when a youthful Perianes played Beethoven’s Sonata Op 110 to Barenboim some 15 years ago; the maestro praises his sense of shape and his beautiful, mellow touch before encouraging him to add more bite to some of the articulations.

As a young pianist on the competition circuit, Perianes scooped prizes across Spain, including first prize and gold medal at the 42nd International Competition Premio Jaén de Piano, 2001, and first prize at the 8th International Piano Competition Fundación Jacinto e Inocencio Guerrero. He was also a prizewinner at the 14th International Competition Vianna da Motta in Lisbon. But with his warm and easy-going character, he was never a typical competition winner; as The Arts Desk put it, reviewing him in 2019, he is ‘not a Spanish fire-eater, but a world-class poet’. He has always been one to go with the flow: ‘One thing leads to another,’ he says simply. The staunch championing of his record label, Harmonia Mundi, has played a crucial role in establishing him on the international scene. During a gradual and steady rise, he won Spain’s National Music Award in 2012; later he was named Artist of the Year 2019 at the International Classical Music Awards.

Spain’s piano tradition, however, has never quite achieved the levels of international fame accorded to the Russian, German or French schools. Perianes has some persuasive thoughts on how and why that should be. ‘It used to be said that Spain was a country more individual than collective,’ he says. ‘Of course we have had wonderful musicians – Pablo Casals, Victoria de los Angeles, Segovia – but although now we have some great orchestras, 20 or 30 years ago that was not so much the case. A Spanish tradition as such is difficult to find. If we go back to Alicia de Larrocha, she was a pupil of Frank Marshall, who had been a student of Granados and became his teaching assistant. But this is relevant specifically to Granados’s approach to his own music.’

Perianes does not see himself as part of this mini-tradition. ‘I only had the chance to work with de Larrocha a couple of times, and that’s not enough to be considered her pupil.’ Instead, he points out, the Spanish tradition was originally … French. His own teacher, Colom, had studied at the École Normale de Musique in Paris and made his debut at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. This was a pattern with deeper roots.

‘Many Spanish musicians had the chance, at the end of the 19th century, to live in Paris, which at that time was culturally the centre of the world. Musicians, painters, sculptors – everyone wanted to go there. So when we talk about de Falla, Granados, Albéniz, Turina and where their teachers were formed, inevitably we are talking about France. That close relationship between France and Spain crossed the frontier all the time.

‘In de Falla and Albéniz, we can recognise many French elements, and in Ravel and Debussy a lot of Spanish influence. This was not only about crossing different cultures, but about connecting them. Ravel’s “Alborada del gracioso” [from Miroirs] is one of the pieces I love the most because it exemplifies perfectly the best of Spain and probably the best of France.’

Debussy and Ravel, he suggests, could synthesise such successful impressions of Spanish music precisely because they had a distinct perspective on it from elsewhere. ‘Debussy never went to Spain, which is almost impossible to believe when you hear pieces such as “La Puerta del Vino” [from Book 2 of the Préludes] or “La soirée dans Grenade” [from Estampes]. But “La Puerta del Vino” was inspired by a postcard!’

There is one overwhelming presence who remains a true icon among Spanish pianists, however, which is of course de Larrocha. Last year marked the centenary of her birth. ‘I’ve been in touch with her daughter, Alicia Torra,’ Perianes says, ‘and she asked me if it is not rather exhausting, whenever I go to the US, Australia or Japan, to keep being told that the last Spanish pianist who played there was Alicia de Larrocha! But I don’t feel any pressure. I feel proud.’

The context of de Larrocha’s life makes her achievements still more astonishing. ‘For a Spanish lady in the 1950s-60s to have that kind of career, “remarkable” would be a very polite word. It’s brutally amazing. When people ask me what is so great about her, I would replicate some words that Martha Argerich used to describe her: she had everything they always wanted – rhythm, colour, beautiful sound. Everything.’ Recording Goyescas, he adds, he had to try not to listen to or even think of her recording of it (‘it is in our DNA’): ‘I was afraid that it would not sound like me, but like someone trying to copy the best.’

Perianes reflects further: ‘During the pandemic, in lockdown here in Spain, my wife decided to make me a beautiful present,’ he says. ‘The last collection of Alicia de Larrocha is almost 50 CDs, with Rachmaninov, Beethoven, Brahms, Granados, Soler, Scarlatti, Ravel, Albéniz … We decided to listen to one CD per day. When I finished listening to the whole box, I had a combination of feelings: one was frustration, because there is not a single CD where she is less than amazing! For everyone who loves the piano, she will always be one of the giants. And for me to go anywhere and to hear that the last Spanish pianist who played with this orchestra back in the 1990s was her …’ He gives a joyous smile. ‘What an honour to be the next one!’

Perianes’s year ahead looks impressive, to put it mildly. In February he premieres a new work written for him by Francisco Coll, at the Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic: a Fantasia for piano and orchestra subtitled ‘Ciudad sin Sueño’ (City without Dreams), before taking it to Toronto for its second performance. Next, he is off to Berlin for a concert with the viola player Tabea Zimmermann, a regular duo partner; he plays Mozart and Beethoven concertos in Reykjavík and Paris; there’s a recital in Madrid’s Teatro Real and, in July, a tour to Australia. And spare time? There is not much of it – but Perianes says his favourite thing is to be at home, ‘to talk with my family and friends and have dinner with my wife. The only target that I have’, he says, ‘is to be able to enjoy every single concert as if it is the last one, because you never know what’s happening next week.’ It’s a sobering thought after the pandemic, when live performance evaporated overnight. ‘So put all your energy into every day that you have.’ 

This article originally appeared in the December 2023 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – explore our subscription offers today