Today the singular details of Enrique Granados’s tragic death in 1916 tend to be better known than his music. The composer drowned trying to save his wife when their ferry across the Channel was torpedoed by a German submarine as the couple were returning from the New York premiere of his opera Goyescas. The stage work had followed the success of Granados’s piano suite of the same name, which was inspired by the paintings and drawings of Goya, though only two of the six movements can be related to specific works.
Though the original Goyescas is one of the great monuments of late-Romantic piano music, the whole set is rarely included in recitals; it lasts almost 50 minutes and is extremely difficult to play. But a complete performance of the pieces did form the second half of Javier Perianes’s recital. He’s certainly a pianist with the agility, heft and stamina to tackle this daunting music, but not, on this evidence, the command of keyboard colour to bring it fully into focus. In the slower movements, one longed for more subtlety and nuance, even the occasional pianissimo rather than a constant mezzo forte, and a lighter touch, too, would have been welcome in El Fandango de Candil. In the final two pieces, especially El Amor y la Muerte, there was a sense that Perianes was at last projecting the music with the vividness it needs, but it was too little too late.
The first half of his programme had been unconvincing, too. It was devoted to three sets of variations, Clara Schumann’s and Brahms’s variations on the same theme from Robert Schumann’s Bunte Blätter flanked Robert’s own set on a theme by Clara, which forms the third movement of his F minor Piano Sonata Op 14. The triangle of connections must have seemed neater on paper than it did in performance, when Clara’s routinely academic workings and Robert’s rather stodgy piece were overshadowed by Brahms’s precocious display of ingenuity, though a pianist who brought more character and colour to the piano writing might have made more of it than Perianes did.
