Charlotte Hu: Goyescas
Pentatone

It's easy to understand why pianist Charlotte Hu was captivated by Enrique Granados's (1867-1916) Goyescas upon encountering it for the first time as a Juilliard student and felt compelled to record the Spanish masterwork for her follow-up to Liszt: Metamorphosis, her 2024 Pentatone debut. In Hu's words, the emotional terrain traversed in its six movements—“passion, tenderness, humour, shadow, and light”—while not exhaustive of human experience is encompassing nonetheless. At fifty-plus minutes, her recording of this staple of the Spanish piano repertoire would have been more than enough to constitute a full release, but Hu's augmented the suite with two Spanish dances to flesh out the Granados portrait and deepen one's appreciation of his artistry.

In addition to being emotionally rich, Goyescas, inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya and published in 1911, is musically sumptuous. For the pianist, there are technical challenges, naturally, but also nuance, intimacy, drama, and intoxicating Spanish melodies. In that regard, the music's an ideal match for an eighteenth-century painter whose works are likewise dark and sensual. Each movement in the suite matches a specific Goya image, making Goyescas a feast for lovers of visual and musical art. The dramatic flourish with which “Los Requiebros” (The Flirtations) initiates the suite establishes the music's allure from the first moment, which is then built upon with infectious melodic statements and playful gestures. Hu's execution is superb, in particular artful pacing and subtle gradations in dynamics that bolster the swoon-inducing effect of the material. Many of the six movements are long, which allows Hu to deliver the music unhurriedly and let it work its seductive magic.

At a dozen minutes, the subsequent “Coloquio en la Reja” grants her even more time to luxuriate in Granados's poetic milieu, which she does with incandescent passages and probing introspection. Each movement exudes Spanish character, but some more than others, “El Fandango del Candil” a case in point. In this relatively short yet memorable setting, Spanish flavour pervades the movement melodically but rhythmically too. The delicate “Quejas o la Maja y el Ruiseñor” (The Maiden and the Nightingale), by comparison, amplifies the suite's lyrical dimension in its examination of romantic and inward-looking facets. Moments of yearning and tenderness emerge that Hu articulates with precision and sensitivity, and a fragile, dream-like quality colours this gently rippling music in Debussy-esque manner. As its title intimates, the suite's penultimate movement, “El Amor y la Muerte: Balada” (Love and Death), is considered the work's summit, emotionally and dramatically. Ruminative in the extreme, the material plunges deeply into passages of Mahler-ian solemnity, sorrow, and longing whilst also challenging the pianist with chromatic writing of daunting complexity. Moments of intense beauty arise also, with the one five minutes in particularly illuminating. Again Hu sustains immaculate control over the music's slow unfolding.

Selected from 12 Danzas españolas, the second (“Oriental,”) and fifth (“Andaluza”) dances might be comparative miniatures, yet they also distill many of the essential characteristics of the composer's music into compact form. The sombre “Oriental” is Granados at his most haunting, and Hu again excels at amplifying its poetic aura of loneliness. Vibrant by comparison is “Andaluza,” which the pianist contends is perhaps the most frequently performed of his dance pieces. Rousing, joyful, and energetic, the music declaims radiantly for four minutes to conclude the album on a note of irrepressible optimism.

August 2026