Background
Manuel de Falla was born on November 23, 1876, in Cadiz, Spain, into a family that had a lively interest in music; the son of Jose Maria Falla, and Maria Jesus Matheu.
(Manuel de Falla's richly evocative music erupts in a riot...)
Manuel de Falla's richly evocative music erupts in a riot of color in this vibrant new recording from Kazuki Yamada with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande for Pentatone. Works included are the ever popular Noches en los jardines de Espana and El sombrero de tres picos as well as movements from La vida breve and El amor brujo. The sultry warm atmosphere of an Andalusian night is almost palpable in Falla's spellbinding Noches en los jardines de Espana. With its shimmering, sensuous harmonies, exquisite orchestral colors and exuberant melodies and rhythms, it's perhaps Falla's most impressionistic work. Using a large orchestral canvas on which he paints with deft, luminous strokes, Falla skillfully integrates a virtuoso piano part to create lovingly evocative music, full of captivating beauty. Elsewhere with the sensational ballet El sombrero de tres picos, Falla conjures up music steeped in Andalusian culture which is boisterous, full-bloodied, and urgent. It's impossible not to be swept along by the drama in this orchestral showpiece. By turn slyrical, sensuous, or dramatic, the meticulously written score is full of surprises and the work positively bristles with wit, energy and exuberant intensity. Yamada's previous recordings with the OSR for Pentatone have been widely praised - ""Exquisite and passionate...grace abounds"" (BBC Music Magazine), ""tastefully refined"" (Gramophone). For their more recent release of music by Roussel, Debussy and Poulenc, HRAudio.net noted Yamada's ""exuberant performance"" and the OSR ""playing...with tremendous vitality and enthusiasm, as if their very lives depended on it."" The pianist Mari Kodama has established an international reputation for profound musicality and articulate virtuosity and has recorded extensively for Pentatone. Her most recent release with her sister Momo Kodama, a sizzling account of Tchaikovsky ballets, was praised by The Guardian for its ""sparkle and style"" and described by Artamag as ""... a very exciting recording, a 'labour of love' by two extraordinary pianists.
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(Manuel de Falla's Seven Canciones Populares Españolas No....)
Manuel de Falla's Seven Canciones Populares Españolas No. 7 "Polo" performed by the Nürnberg Symphony Orchestra and José Maria Perez with Hanspeter Gmür conducting. When sold by Amazon.com, this product is manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
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Manuel de Falla was born on November 23, 1876, in Cadiz, Spain, into a family that had a lively interest in music; the son of Jose Maria Falla, and Maria Jesus Matheu.
His mother gave him piano lessons, and from local musicians he had instruction in harmony, counterpoint, and solfeggio. At the age of 20 he enrolled in the Madrid Conservatory and earned the school's highest awards in piano. More important to him, though, since he did not want to be a concert pianist, was his composition study with Felipe Pedrell. Working with that ardent nationalist for 3 years, Falla entered deeply into the study of his country's folk music and made his goal the development of an expressive mode of composition rooted in Spanish culture.
In Siete canciones populares espanoles (1914) Falla took folk songs whole and put them in simple but imaginative settings; generally, however, he freely used only certain aspects of folk originals to give a Spanish quality to his compositions. Examples occur in his first important work, the two-act opera La vida breve (1905), which calls up memories of Giacomo Puccini and Richard Wagner but makes its best effects from the employment of two varieties of folk music native to Andalusia: lively flamenco dance rhythms and melodic patterns of the passionate, sometimes melancholic, type of song known as the cante hondo. These two elements also served Falla in his work through 1919, which includes music written in France as well as at home.
Living in Paris from 1907 to 1914, Falla came under the influence of Claude Debussy, whose impressionistic techniques are plainly audible in Quatres pièces espagnoles (1908) for piano and Noches en los jardines de España (1916) for piano and orchestra. The image of Spain shines through, though, in their thematic material and in Falla's evocation of guitar qualities in his treatment of both piano and orchestra. The same may be said of the music that closed what is commonly called his Andalusian period: El amor brujo (1915), a ballet containing the well-known "Ritual Fire Dance; " El sombrero de tres picos (1919), another ballet; and his single large piece for solo piano, Fantasía bética (1919). The balance of Falla's production is less locally centered, less picturesque, but no less Spanish in impulse. Its high spots are a delightful puppet opera, El retablo de Maese Pedro (1923), based on a scene from Cervantes' Don Quixote, and a rather severe-sounding concerto in neoclassic vein for harpsichord and chamber orchestra (1926). His last work, an enormous cantata entitled La Atlántida, which occupied him from 1928 until his death, was left unfinished.
Falla died on November 14, 1946, in Argentina, where he had moved in 1939 after deciding that he could no longer adapt himself to the Franco regime. Long before then he had been accepted as the foremost creative musician of his time in Spain. Present-day criticism is less favorable, viewing his music as expressively strong but limited in range and technical originality.
(Manuel de Falla's richly evocative music erupts in a riot...)
(Manuel de Falla's Seven Canciones Populares Españolas No....)
In 1935 he became an Associate of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium. He was also a Member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and a Member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Nuestra Senora de las Angustias.
Manuel de Falla never married and had no children.