Danzas fantásticas Op.22 (1919) [15:45]
Poema en forma de canciones Op.19* (1917) [10:58]
Saeta en forma de salve a la Virgen de la Esperanza Op.60* (1931) [3:34]
Farruca from Triptico Op.45* (1928) [3:01]
Ritmos Op.43 (1927-8) [15:04]
Sinfonía sevillana Op.23 (1920) [22:26]
Clara Mouriz* (mezzo)
BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena
rec. MediaCity UK, Salford, England, 9 December 2011 (Danzas); 27 January 2012 (Sinfonia); 21 June 2012 (all other works)
CHANDOS CHAN 10753 [71:27]
Something remarkable has arrived from Salford. Not just a fine disc of music that deserves far wider acquaintance — Joaquín Turina’s orchestral output, slender as it is, represents some of the most vividly imagined Spanish nationalist writing of the early twentieth century — but a recording that makes you forget you’re listening to a recording at all.
The BBC Philharmonic’s new home at MediaCity UK turns out to be an inspired acoustic environment. There’s bloom here, warmth without woolliness, the kind of natural resonance that lets a suspended cymbal catch the air at the edge of audibility and a solo harp line shimmer with something close to physical presence. The Chandos production team — Brian Pidgeon and Mike George producing, Stephen Rinker at the engineering controls — has delivered something genuinely special. Credit where it’s due. This is what great studio work sounds like.
But none of it would matter without Juanjo Mena.
What Mena understands — and this is the crucial thing — is that Turina’s orchestral writing rewards patience. These scores are all about layered atmosphere, about the careful accumulation of detail, about what happens in the spaces between the big gestures. The Danzas fantásticas makes the point immediately. From the opening bars, you’re aware of a soundstage with genuine perspective — foreground and background, near and far, the orchestra breathing as a single organism. The harp writing alone is extraordinary, and here it sounds exactly as Turina must have imagined it: crystalline, precise, never decorative for decoration’s sake.
It’s worth pausing on a biographical curiosity. Turina’s catalog runs to Op. 104, yet for all his mastery of large forces — and this music proves he had it absolutely — he wrote remarkably little for orchestra, and still less for orchestra without soloists. One suspects he simply preferred the intimacy of chamber textures, the piano, the voice. The Poema en forma de canciones and the brief, haunting “Saeta en forma de salve a la Virgen de la Esperanza” suggest a composer for whom the human voice was never far from his thinking, even when he was writing purely instrumental music.
I know the Regis album with Enrique Bátiz, and it has its own legitimate pleasures. Bátiz works with strong primary colors — high contrast, maximum theatrical impact, the big dramatic moments front and center. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some music genuinely needs that kind of treatment. But Mena is doing something different and, I think, something closer to the essential character of these scores. His palette is wider, more finely graded, built on shadings and nuances that accumulate almost subliminally. Where Bátiz announces, Mena reveals.
The Sinfonía sevillana is the longest work here and the one that most tests a director’s structural sense. Turina sustains it beautifully — the three movements trace the arc of a Sevillian day with an almost cinematic vividness — and Mena never lets the picturesque elements tip into mere postcard prettiness. The brass swagger when they need to swagger. But even in the music’s most extrovert moments, you’re always aware of the detail underneath.
Young Turina went to Paris and fell briefly under the spell of César Franck. The evidence here makes that hard to imagine. This is music of place, of heat and shadow, of specific streets and specific light. Call it atmospheric, sensuous, colorful — the words are accurate, if inadequate. What this rendition does is make those qualities feel earned rather than assumed.
The finest recording of this repertoire I’ve heard. Full stop.
