There are few more technically or idiomatically teasing pages in all romantic keyboard literature than Albeniz’s Iberia, a sumptuous tapestry of largely southern and gipsy Spain. Hardly a question of difficulty for difficulty’s sake, Albeniz’s summa and final vision could only be expressed in such astonishing efflorescence, the notes often spilling in necessary rather than perverse profusion on to three rather than two staves. Sadly, if understandably, Iberia falls outside the scope of pianists (including Horowitz) daunted more by an exotic and seemingly inaccessible idiom than by pages of such cruelly deployed intricacy. It is a thousand pities that Rubinstein, whose legendary poetic empathy and joie de vivre in this suite made his adoring Spanish public relinquish their sense of national and proprietorial rights, never recorded Iberia, though Alicia de Larrocha’s tirelessly celebrated performances are a rich compensation. Rubinstein may have been Larrocha’s mentor and guiding star but he was among the first to marvel at her aristocratic distinction, expressed in a rhythmic subtlety and textural translucency that made competition near impossible.
As in Parliament, the lack of a plausible or fruitful opposition is unhealthy, and although Tenerife-born Guillermo Gonzalez is an industrious and committed champion his Herculean labour falls short on too many counts. Happiest in repose (in, say, ‘Evocacion’ rather than ‘Lavapies’) he is also successful in the melancholy guitar strokes at the start of ‘El Albaicin’ and in the earthy and robust rhythms of ‘El polo’ (hardly music in ‘discreet Technicolor’, Wilfrid Mellers’s amusing description of Moszkowski’s elegant picture postcard reduction of Spain). But the orgiastic clangour of ‘Lavapies’ – music which prompted Messiaen to claim Albeniz ‘parmi les etoiles’ – is tamed, and an element of caution broadening into strenuousness affects too many pages elsewhere.
Gonzalez can be heavy-handed, too, in the more rudimentary charms of ‘Cataluna’ and ‘Cadiz’ (from Suite espanola No. 1) where his unsubtle pedalling and, more generally, subnormal tempos hardly elevate the music to a higher level. The Madrid-based recordings are impressive and Jacinto Torres’s accompanying essay is exemplary but, despite the tempting price, there is little competition for Larrocha’s inimitable (heard at its least constrained on EMI’s reissue of her 1962 Hispavox recording).'