Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)
L’œuvre pour piano
José Echániz (piano)
rec. 1953
Reviewed as a download
Forgotten Records fr2364 [63]
Born in Cuba to a Basque father and Cuban mother of French/Italian heritage, José Echániz (1905-1969) studied first with his father, and then with Ignacio Tellería and Alberto Falcón at the Falcón Conservatory. (Jorge Bolet’s sister, his first teacher, also studied with Falcón.) Echániz moved to the United States in the 1920s, touring with tenor Tito Schipa and making a handful of 78rpm records for Columbia Records. (These can be heard on YouTube.) He taught at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, for a quarter of a century, his tenure there ending only with his death. In addition to his work as a pianist, Echániz was a conductor, leading the Grand Rapids Symphony in Michigan in the 1940s and ‘50s.
Echániz was marketed to the U.S. public as a Latin firebrand, and in the 1950s, he became Westminster Records’ house “Spanish” pianist, recording a complete Albéniz Iberia cycle, a complete Granados Goyescas, the complete piano works of de Falla offered here, and then a passel of other Spanish or Latin American-themed LPs featuring the music of composers like Villa-Lobos, Turina, and Lecuona. Interestingly, Echániz in private seems to have been more of a classicist than a hotblooded Romantic; his main musical loves were Bach and Mozart, and pianists in his studio at Eastman were often assigned group projects like presenting the complete Mozart piano concerti or the complete Well-Tempered Clavier.
Listening to this de Falla disc, one can hear the qualities that must have excited the executives at Westminster Records. The pianist plays the music with energy, clarity, and élan. The famous “Ritual Fire Danse” from El amor brujo opens the album, likely given prominence in a bid to sell more copies of the record. (It is easy to forget that in the pre-rock and roll era this piece was considered a real headbanger and was a constant presence on the radio, usually heard in the capable hands of Arthur Rubinstein, José Iturbi, or, less capably, Liberace.) Echániz does not achieve the wild brutality of Rubinstein, but he has an impressively fast trill, and the piece goes as it should. The other excerpts from El amor brujo are unremarkable. Echániz was not a luscious colorist; there is no sonic magic á la George Copeland, who was the champ when it came to vivid, sultry performances of Spanish repertoire. The playing sounds very much like that of the pianists of the French school from the early 20th century, with a heavy emphasis on clarity and emotional tidiness. Near the end of the Pantomime movement, Echániz does find a moment of impressive stillness which is very moving in its own way. The other ballet “fillers” on the album from El sombrero de tres picos are similarly played to the El amor brujo excerpts, with nice forward motion and precision, but little animal excitement.
We are on safer ground in the pieces originally written for solo piano. The Vals-Capricho is a harmless little salon morsel, and Echániz plays it very straight without much rubato or any attempt at being cute. The ending has a pleasant amount of zip to it. The Serenata andaluza is similarly inoffensive, and Echániz gives it some nice sparkle. The pianist applies some poignant timing in Chopinesque Nocturno, but his rather flinty sound makes it less of a salon gem than it might be in other hands.
When we reach the four Pièces espagnoles of 1909, we are finally hearing the authentic de Falla. The salon dandy of the earlier pieces was grasping his way towards a more interesting, and perhaps more “Spanish” style. The keyboard and dynamic ranges widen, the language becomes more stereotypically Spanish (with evocations of guitar and the use of idiomatic dance rhythms), and the moods become more varied. Echániz is alert to this deepening, with the playing becoming easier and more interesting from a color perspective. All four pieces of the little set are given successful performances, though Echániz seems happiest in “Andaluza,” the rough-and-ready final movement.
We now arrive at the centerpiece of the album. Written for Arthur Rubinstein, the Fantasia Bætica (1919) mostly remains in the repertoire via the efforts of Spanish specialists. Although non-specialist pianists such as Mark Hambourg (who made the first-ever recording), David Burge, Paul Jacobs, and Garrick Ohlsson have taken the piece up, it is chock-full of notes and in my experience, not an audience favorite, though in the right hands it can be thrilling. de Falla may have been writing to impress Rubinstein, and the result is that the fantasia is much busier than it needs to be. The impression the music gives is often one of multiple mad flamenco guitarists sprinting at each other from across a packed cantina. The few moments of repose are gorgeous; I believe that the central Molto lento section is meant to evoke the cante jondo, or “deep song” of the flamenco tradition. Echániz has a chance in this piece to display his well-trained fingers, and he does not disappoint; he handles the thousands of notes with relative ease and a minimum of pedal, pointing again to a possible French influence in his training. One hears an idiomatic rhythmic snap in his playing that is made possible by his clarification of textures via careful pedaling. I very much like Echániz’s playing of the very defined, yet rapid triplet figures that de Falla sprinkles throughout the score. The central cante jondo episode is played in a penetrating, deeply emotional manner, in direct opposition to the shorter lyrical episodes of the piece, which are then given a more businesslike, unsentimental reading. This works oddly well, and I have not heard any other performance quite capture these elements of the score.
The two Homenaje works receive reflective performances, with Echániz playing up the sharpness of the grief audible in the Debussy homage.
Richard Masters
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Contents
Excerpts from El amor brujo
Danza ritual del fuego
El círculo mágico (Romance del pescador)
Danza del terror
Pantomima
Excerpts from El sombrero de tres picos
Danza de la molinera
Danza del molinero
Danza del Corregidor
Vals-capricho
Serenata andaluza
Nocturno
Cuatro pièzas españolas
Fantasía Bætica
Homenaje a la tumba de Paul Dukas
Homenaje a la tumba de Debussy
