Emanuel Overbeeke has reviewed Charlotte Hu’s Goyescas for the Dutch website Opus Klassiek, offering a thoughtful reflection on the challenges of Granados’s piano cycle.
Overbeeke describes the work as torn between two ideas: striking rhythms that demand great precision, and emotional outbursts that disregard those rigid rhythms. Where Alicia de Larrocha emphasized the former and Jean-Philippe Collard the latter, he writes that Hu attempts to have it both ways. The tension between constraint and release, he notes, is part of what makes the cycle so different from one recording to the next. He finds her playing as capricious as the music itself, with passages of great freedom that can be surprising and exciting, and moments of new insight. Throughout, he hears her love for sharp articulations, clear dynamic contrasts, and attention to polyphony and textural contrasts.
Goyescas was released on 5 June and pairs Granados’s complete Goyescas suite with two of his Danzas españolas, No. 2 “Oriental” and No. 5 “Andaluza”.
Read the full review on Opus Klassiek.