Recently, Alicia deLarrocha, a true piano legend, passed on at 86. This New York Times obituary gives details of her extraordinary career. She was for me, after Artur Rubinstein, the supreme classical pianist I had the great good fortune to hear in concert. I heard her many times over a 35-year period. To all LFTC readers with a love of music, if you have never heard her, find her on YouTube and play a Spanish piece Even Rubinstein, a great Spanish music player, conceded she was without peer in that repertoire. Her Mozart sub-specialty was superb, and she played other composers superbly as well--even Chopin. She also edited a definitive edition of the complete works of Granados--her prime teacher, Frank Marshall, has studied with Granados.
The NY Tiems piece presents her view of Spain's three foremost piano composers:
Ms. de Larrocha’s most enduring contribution, however, was her championship of Spanish composers. Although Arthur Rubinstein played some of this repertory, few other pianists outside Spain did, and none with Ms. de Larrocha’s flair. She made enduring recordings of Albéniz’s “Iberia” and Granados’s “Goyescas,” and helped ease those works into the standard piano canon. She also made a powerful case for the piano music of Joaquín Turina, a composer otherwise known mostly for the guitar music he wrote for Andrés Segovia, and she almost single-handedly built a following for Federico Mompou, a Catalan composer of quietly shimmering, poetic works.
Although she was often regarded as partial to Granados — her mother and an aunt were among his piano students, but he died before Ms. de Larrocha was born — she refused to cite a favorite.
“I don’t believe there is a ‘best’ of anything in this life,” she said in a 1978 interview with Contemporary Keyboard. “I would say, though, that Granados was one of the great Spanish composers, and that, in my opinion, he was the only one that captured the real Romantic flavor. His style was aristocratic, elegant and poetic — completely different from Falla and Albéniz. To me, each of them is a different world. Falla was the one who really captured the spirit of the Gypsy music. And Albéniz, I think was more international than the others. Even though his music is Spanish in flavor, his style is completely Impressionistic.”
The obit notes that the great New York Times music critic, Harold C Schonberg, himself once a pianist, wrote of her playing style:
Reviewing the concert in The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg wrote of her Spanish set that “she had a way of idiomatically shaping a musical phrase that cannot be taught — a sudden dynamic shift, a note instinctively accented, a touch of the pedal, an application of rubato. Her rhythm was extraordinarily flexible. Obviously this music is in the pianist’s blood. She invested it with a degree of life and imagination that not many pianists before the public today could begin to duplicate.”
I was lucky that my own main musical mentor introduced me to the music of this great artist and took me to hear her in recital. My mentor once found himself sitting nest to none other than Rubinstein, at one of deLarrocha's first New york recitals. They chatted at intermission, and after Rubinstein said, in a supreme accolade from one legend to another: "I think we had better both go home and practice."
Said it all, didn't he?
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