Brazilian Guitar Quartet: Spanish Dances
The Unique patterns and sounds of Spanish music – as perhaps most idiomatically realized in the more than 1,000 dance forms native to the Iberian peninsula – is one of the richest cross-cultural amalgams to be found anywhere. Its structural, harmonic and rhythmic foundations go back as far as the Moorish invasions, the Medieval Sephardic Jews, and the glories of the Spanish Renaissance. This broadly-based heritage, in turn, was carried across the Atlantic to the new world – where it became the primary foundation of Latin American music.
Acknowledging their debt to Iberian musical traditions, the members of the illustrious Brazilian Guitar Quartet were inspired to prepare a program devoted entirely to Spanish music. In this – the sixth of this Latin GRAMMY-winning ensemble’s recordings for Delos – they pay passionate and sensitive tribute to their old-world musical heritage. Their selections – some well-known, some uncommon – are drawn mostly from the piano compositions by the finest Spanish composers of the 20th Century, expertly transcribed for guitar quartet by Tadeu do Amaral, the BGQ’s gifted arranger.
One could say that Isaac Albéniz (1860- 1909), Enrique Granados (1867-1916) and Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) form the “great trinity” of Spanish nationalistic music. All of them were deeply influenced by the ideas of Felipe Pedrell (1841-1922), a Spanish composer and musicologist who set the premises for composing music with a strong national identity and bearing the particular influence of the flamenco, one of Spain’s most prominent folkloric styles, especially throughout Andalusia.
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