PENTATONE’s delightful new Content Support & Social Media Intern, Sheida Najafi, has selected Goyescas by Charlotte Hu as July’s Personal Pick of the Month!
“In the short time since its release, I keep finding myself returning to this recording. Like Charlotte Hu, I was introduced to this music during my own conservatory years. It felt like my personal discovery, and I admit I also wanted to show off by picking unconventional repertoire. I remember printing out the suite and bringing it to the first lesson of my third semester of piano. I was always a bit ambitious with my repertoire choices, and my teacher had to manage my unrealistic expectations of my own technique and find a middle ground. In the end, it wasn’t the right choice for me, and the Goyescas never made it into that year’s repertoire. But since I couldn’t let go of my curiosity about Granados, I kept practicing the Spanish Dances on my own.
One look at the sheet music makes it obvious: this suite is technically heavy. But even if you have the technique, it takes much more than that. What the Goyescas truly asks for is poetry in rhythm and time, storytelling in musical form, and a colorful imagination for sound: the ability to paint Goya’s world of majas and majos, of flirtation, candlelight, and death. This is where Charlotte Hu shines. She has a vast palette and remarkable control over it; she sounds free, powerful, and confident in choosing her own narrative and colors, bringing the stories and characters of Goya’s paintings to life.
“Quejas o la maja y el ruiseñor” is, for me, the suite’s most beloved page, full of love, longing, and melancholy, almost like a sweet memory from the past. Hu finds that memory, black and white and covered in dust, wipes it clean, and lets us see it in new, vivid color. She makes it feel effortless, in a way that makes you wish you could do the same. I love that she sounds free from the weight of earlier recordings of this suite and offers a version that is truly her own, in her rhythms and her rubatos. Sometimes this music is not for dancing, but for remembering a dance that is lost.
At the end of the recording, she does the same to my own memory. The haunting “Oriental” and the guitar-inflected “Andaluza” bring me back to the days I spent trying to play these pieces myself. Hearing Hu play them took me straight back to those joyful moments of first discovering the sound of Granados. This is a recording full of color, story, memory, and freedom, and one I will keep close to me for years to come.”
Goyescas by Charlotte Hu is now available for streaming and purchase, digitally and physically.
