TURINA : Verbena madrileña • En la zapateria • Linterna mágica • El Circo • Radio Madrid (Jordi Masó) FLAC (tracks), lossless

Are Catalonian pianist Jordi Masó's recordings of Joaquín Turina's music getting better and better, or is it just that those who have followed the series from the beginning have become more attuned to how inexcusable the neglect of this composer has been? In any event, these ingenious program music pieces are lost treasures of 20th century piano music. The evening opens with a suite, Verbena madrileña, Op. 42 (Madrid Fair), that offers Turina's usual mixture of French Impressionist and Spanish regional elements, with a rip-roaring, ragtime-like "Baile castizo" finale. From there on out, things get really delightfully original in conception and perfectly controlled in execution. En la zapatería (At the Shoemaker's Shop) is a little tribute to, of all people, Wagner, with two quotations in the opening movement from Die Meistersinger: the connection is that Hans Sachs in that opera is a cobbler. El circo, Op. 68 (The Circus), one of the later Turina pieces, is a breathtaking evocation of various circus acts, with trapeze artists at the end. And finally comes the absolutely nonpareil Radio Madrid, Op. 62, which is almost Ivesian in its conception: the opening movement depicts a pair of radio announcers conversing, with a neutral background (representing the period when the microphone is off) as prelude and as unifying sonority later on. Masó, it is clear, knows this music better than anybody else, and Naxos' engineers have settled into a fine, somewhat intimate acoustic for the series. Very highly recommended. by James Manheim  

Joaquín Turina (1882-1949)

1-5    Verbena madrileña, Op. 42
6-12    En la zapateria, Op. 71
13-15    Linterna mágica, Op. 101
16-21    El Circo, Op. 68
22-25    Radio Madrid, Op. 62

Piano – Jordi Masó