Albéniz Improvisations

This edition comprises the first published transcription of three Edison cylinders (now belonging to the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona) recorded by Isaac Albéniz in 1903 during a stay in Tiana, on the Catalonian coast of the Mediterranean. The recordings, which are provided on a compact disc that comes with the score, had previously been transferred to more modern recording media (for example, The Catalan Piano Tradition, various pianists [VAI Audio VAIA/IPA 1001 (1992)], CD). This time, editor Milton Laufer has researched the matter of pitch (summarized in the preface) and concluded that the previous transfers were a half-step high, and so—following the new transfers—has transcribed two of the “improvisations” in F minor, and the third in D♭ major. While I am not in a position to evaluate his research on early recordings, my pianist’s ear tells me that this is the right choice. Not only are the pieces more idiomatic—grateful to the hand—in the keys found here, but since true equal temperament was not widely practiced at the time, different tonalities had subtly different characters. Under Albéniz’s hands the faster pieces (even with the degraded sound quality) sound far closer to the somewhat glum, veiled F-minor color than the more taut character of F♯ minor.

“These improvisations,” Laufer observes, “are the only extant recordings of Isaac Albéniz. It is easy to speculate on what they present: perhaps thematic material for his operas or zarzuelas, songs, or unwritten pieces for piano solo. It is most likely, however, that they simply were invented at the moment and were thus truly improvisatory” (p. iv–v). This judgment seems premature; these morceaux seem informal but hardly truly spontaneous. They are charming, relatively straightforward, characteristically Spanish in their rumination on the Phrygian tetrachord and use of guitar figuration—but for all their informality, they are possessed of an almost suspicious kind of finish. At the piano, the composer seems to know exactly where he is going at all times from beginning to end, with the structural shaping and succession of ideas already established. Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu, op. 66, makes for an instructive comparison since it was a finished work that Chopin chose not to publish: bitesized, simply structured, and unremittingly attractive. Chopin biographer Arthur Hedley speculated that the eventual Op. 66 may have been a bit too close in style to an already-published piece by Ignaz Moscheles (Chopin [London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1947], 156); alternatively, Chopin may have liked having something this charming in his back pocket, an unfamiliar but captivating morsel to charm friends and admirers. So it might well be with these three Albéniz pieces; the unreflective playing-through that they receive suggests that they had been played many more times than at the recording session. In the transcriptions, Laufer provides quite a few commonsensical performance indications regarding tempo, but these seem to be prescriptive rather than reflective of what Albéniz actually does on the recording. We will return to this point: if these are “works” rather than “improvisations,” that is relevant to the way this edition is to be thought of and used.

The cylinders bear the library catalog numbers 167, 168, and 169, and Laufer believes them to have been recorded in that order. Still, he tells us, “For the purpose of performance aesthetics, the sequence of cylinders had been reordered to 168, 167, and 169 respectively. This arrangement creates a more natural relationship between the transcriptions for those performing them as a complete set” (p. v). The question thus raised is how much sense it would make for a pianist to learn—painstakingly as always, one assumes, with the usual responsible manner of slow practice, notating of...