Some composer’s shouldn’t do hell. Berlioz? Now he did hell! Liszt? He couldn’t do anything but hell; his heaven was insipid. But Granados? Forget it. There’s a reason his 30-minute tone poem Dante has managed to avoid appearing on CD before now. It’s lousy. The first part, “Dante and Virgil”, consists of 12 minutes of totally generic late Romantic chromatic sludge. The second part, “Paolo and Francesca” (yes, of “da Rimini” fame), recapitulates the sludge from the first part and then pointlessly adds a mezzo-soprano singing the lines from Dante that tell the two lovers’ unhappy story. There’s no drama, no excitement, no memorable melodic material, no ear-catching orchestration. If Granados had been Russian, at least there would have been a performance tradition that inflicted huge cuts on the work and tossed in some healthy tam-tam crashes at every opportunity to liven things up. As it stands, we have only Adrian Leaper’s earnest but tentative and (one presumes) literal presentation of the boring facts.
With Catalan composer Anselm Ferrer’s aptly colorful orchestrations of the Five Pieces on Spanish Popular Songs we’re fortunately back in familiar Nationalist territory, though the two excerpts from the operatic version of Goyescas don’t add much to a pretty dull party. Whether these items offer sufficient incentive to splurge on this full-priced disc you’ll have to decide for yourself. With respect to Dante, it’s useful to remember that sometimes there’s a good reason that major works by well-known composers remain neglected for many years. ASV’s sound also has a distinctly dry, studio-bound quality, hardly adding to this disc’s appeal. As one who almost invariably enjoys Spanish music and who really looked forward to hearing these works, Leaper & Co.’s efforts turn out to be a huge disappointment, certainly not entirely, or even largely, their fault.
