Granados/ Riva - Piano Music 8

Granados was primarily influenced by mid-nineteenth century European Romanticism, especially the music of Schumann and Chopin. The introverted luxuriance of his luminous harmonies, his rich palette of pianistic color, loose formal structures and his vivid imagination, always tinged with nostalgia, place him firmly within the Romantic School. It has frequently been commented that large forms, such as sonatas and concertos did not attract him. His artistic personality was better suited to shorter, rhapsodic forms, especially those based on variations. All of the compositions recorded here are works of Granados's juvenilia composed between 1884, the year he began studying with Felipe Pedrell in Barcelona (followed by further studies in Paris, 1887-1889), and ending about 1895. As a group they are generally immature works of a young composer striving to find his own individual artistic personality. Many of these pieces are somewhat similar to one another, being sketches or brief compositions characterized by an unfocused formal structure and harmonic ambiguity. Very few of them are firmly rooted in one tonality. Granados frequently vacillated from one tonality to another and had a tendency to place the final cadence of a given composition on the dominant, consequently not concluding the work in the original tonality. The fact that many of these works were not highly developed would tend to suggest that most were never revised by the composer.