A success in Turina (Albert Guinovart’s recent Harmonia Mundi disc – 10/96) is one thing, but Granados’s Goyescas – among the glories of romantic keyboard literature – represent an altogether different, infinitely more demanding challenge. For here is music of a transcendental intricacy, requiring an effortless, elegant, yet potent mastery. Even a hint of laboriousness or caution and the flavour is lost, the music robbed of its sensuous and bejewelled magic. For Guinovart safety sadly but necessarily comes first. He cannot allow himself the sort of improvisatory freedom or poetic daring that can unlock such ultra-Spanish discourse. The ear quickly tires of his strenuousness and monochrome sonority, whether in a relative jeu d’esprit such as ‘El pelele’ or in the darker, multicoloured textures and recesses of ‘El amor y la muerte’ or ‘Epilogo: La serenata del espectro’. His occasional inarticulacy, too (the triplets in the conclusion to ‘Los requiebros’ (con molto gallardia e ben marcato) is particularly damaging when you realize that every one of Granados’s teeming notes is worth its weight in gold. He makes heavy weather of the Allegretto arioso in ‘Coloquio en la reja’ and the nightingale at the end of ‘Quejas o la maja y el ruisenor’ sounds outsize and indelicate.
The recording is bold and spacious but such playing scarcely comes within distance of Alicia de Larrocha, whether on her tirelessly celebrated Decca recording or on an early Erato record (reissued on a two-disc set by EMI).'