Debussy: Ibéria. Turina: Danzas fantásticas, op. 22; Sinfonia sevillana, op. 23; La procesión del Rocío, op. 9.
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; Jesús López-Cobos, conductor.
Telarc CD-80574. Recorded [dates and venue not provided]. CD.
There’s a particular pleasure in encountering repertoire that sits just outside the standard canon—music that rewards attention without demanding the kind of reverent approach we bring to Beethoven or Brahms. This Telarc disc pairs Debussy’s Ibéria with three orchestral works by Joaquín Turina, and the Cincinnati Symphony under Jesús López-Cobos makes a persuasive case for the Spaniard, if not quite for everything here.
Start with the Debussy, because that’s where the disc starts—and where it stumbles. Ibéria, the second of the three Images for orchestra, is one of those works that reveals a conductor’s temperament almost immediately. The opening “Par les rues et par les chemins” needs a certain reckless forward energy, a willingness to let the winds tumble over each other, and López-Cobos holds things a touch too carefully. The playing is clean, assured—sometimes too assured. “Les parfums de la nuit” ought to feel genuinely nocturnal, humid, the kind of darkness that has weight and smell to it. Here it’s more like a tasteful watercolor than the thing itself. And the finale, “Le matin d’un jour de fête,” with its famous pizzicato strings evoking flamenco guitars—a wonderful sleight of hand on Debussy’s part—generates excitement but not quite the eruption of street noise and sunlight that Reiner or Monteux could conjure. A late tubular bell entry, slightly misjudged, doesn’t help.
The Turina is another matter entirely.
Turina occupies an odd position in musical history—a Sevillian who studied in Paris with d’Indy, absorbed French impressionism and German counterpoint, then returned home to write music that smells unmistakably of Andalusia. The Danzas fantásticas, op. 22, composed in 1920, draws its three movements from a novel by José Más—“Exaltación,” “Ensueño,” and “Orgía“—and López-Cobos finds in them an immediacy that eluded him in the Debussy. The “Exaltación” unfolds with genuine warmth, its principal theme so close to Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat at moments that you half expect the Miller to appear. Turina knew Falla well, of course, and the influence runs deep—but Turina’s melodic instinct is his own, more lyrical, less astringent. The “Orgía” finale is genuinely dramatic, the orchestra digging in with rhythmic bite that had been largely absent earlier in the program.
The Sinfonia sevillana, op. 23—written in the same year as the Danzas, almost as a companion piece—is better described as a triptych of symphonic pictures than anything resembling a symphony in the formal sense. Its central movement, “En el Guadalquivir,” opens with a violin solo of considerable beauty, the Cincinnati strings warm and well blended, before the cor anglais takes over with that characteristic Spanish melancholy. The undulating accompaniment throughout—suggesting the river’s slow, wide movement—is handled with genuine sensitivity. This is López-Cobos at his most persuasive.
La procesión del Rocío, op. 9, predates both works by seven years and carries the rougher energy of a younger composer still finding his voice. The second movement’s arrival of the procession itself, announced by pipes and drums before the Spanish national anthem swells into view, has a pageant-like quality that the Cincinnati brass deliver with appropriate grandeur—though the Telarc recording, exceptionally warm and perhaps excessively so, robs the brass of some needed edge and brilliance at precisely these moments.
That recording question nags. Telarc’s engineers have given Cincinnati’s Music Hall a lush, enveloping acoustic that flatters string tone and inner detail beautifully—but the sound lacks immediacy when the music demands it. The top of the orchestra, the shimmer and cut of the winds and brass, gets softened in ways that occasionally work against the music’s character.
Still, as an introduction to Turina’s orchestral writing—music that deserves far more attention than it typically receives—this disc serves admirably. López-Cobos knows this repertoire in his bones, and his orchestra plays for him with evident commitment. The Debussy is the weak link, not badly done but somehow too polished, too contained. The Turina earns its place on the shelf.
