Here, for the first time, Albeniz’s masterpiece, Iberia, appears on a single CD, played with immaculate musical taste and enviable fluency by English-born but Japan-based Nicholas Unwin. Alas, taste becomes a slim virtue where Albeniz’s blazing passions, his volatile mix of aristocratic hauteur and tropical efflorescence are concerned. For Debussy, quoted in the sleeve, ‘Eritana’ (the final piece in the cycle) is ‘a morning glory … never has music achieved such diversified, such colourful impressions, our eyes close as though bedazzled by beholding too great a wealth of images.’ Debussy’s awe in the face of Albeniz’s incomparable tapestry, with its tireless alternations of sunshine and shadows, lassitude and hyperactivity, tells us how even an often cruelly discriminating critic can be subdued and taken over. But although Unwin’s cool-headed mastery resolves every daunting intricacy, where is the underlying intensity behind, say, the central sempre dolce cantando of ‘El Corpus en Sevilla’?
Again, the transformation from innocent to voluptuary in ‘Rondena’ (the central poco meno mosso) is hardly suggested. The brusque et forte interjections in ‘Almeria’ lack that sudden anger inseparable from the Spanish temperament and time and again Unwin’s dynamic range is too narrow (at least for a composer who ranges unapologetically from pppp to ffff). ‘El Albaicin’ is allegro assai but is it melancolico ? ‘Malaga’ gets off to a dull start, its opening bustle hardly vivo as marked, so that the music’s underlying character or sub-text is somehow missing.
The recordings are surprisingly close and airless for this source, and although the front cover’s photograph of windmills provides a nice touch, the performances are too respectable – more sense than sensibility. Alicia de Larrocha’s several recordings of Iberia (notably her first on EMl) remain in a class of their own and Martin Jones’s recent performance (part of a four-disc set of music by Albeniz and Granados) are more wide-ranging and inclusive.
Meanwhile, even a pirated recording by Artur Rubinstein (Iberia’s most celebrated interpreter) continues to elude collectors and search parties, however avid.'