Great Performers: Alicia de Larrocha
Born in Barcelona on 23 May 1923, Alicia de Larrocha y de la Calle came from a musical family; her mother and her aunt were disciples of the composer and pianist Enrique Granados. Having gravitated towards the piano as a toddler, young Alicia began lessons aged three with Granados's teaching assistant, Frank Marshall. Although deeply immersed in the Spanish tradition, Marshall insisted that his gifted student gain a solid foundation in Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin, which, in turn, helped to inform what would become de Larrocha's standard-setting interpretations of Spanish music. She explained in a 1973 'Gramophone' interview: "if you can't play Bach correctly, you can't play Spanish music. The Spanish style is like Chopin Mazurkas – free in the melody, but solid at the bottom."
Read more…With the appearance of de Larrocha's first major label recordings in the 1950s, critics not only acknowledged her innate affinity for the Spanish idiom, but also noted how the specificity of her characterizations uncovered new depths and meanings within such large-scale pillars of the repertoire as Granados's 'Goyescas', Albéniz's 'Iberia', and de Falla's 'Fantasia Baetica'. She revitalized and repositioned this music to the point where her interpretations became a frame of reference. In a way, de Larrocha's advocacy for Spanish piano music parallels Maria Callas's contributions to the Bel Canto revival, Artur Schnabel's influence on Beethoven interpretation and Walter Gieseking's clairvoyant identification with Debussy's sound world.
Listen, for example, to how she pinpoints the frequently changing shifts of mood in 'Los Requiebros ', while effortlessly clarifying the complex textural strands. Her approach to each of the 'Iberia' suite’s twelve movements constitutes a veritable master class in controlled freedom. Even the little Spanish character pieces gain new stature under de Larrocha’s hands. Take Albéniz's Tango, for instance: most pianists uniformly stress the first beat of each measure, and let the basic tango rhythm run on cruise control; by contrast, de Larrocha creates a genuine conversation between her precisely voiced left-hand accompanying figures and eloquently phrased right-hand lines. She heightens the melody's points of tension and release with droplets of rubato that sound spontaneous yet inevitable at the same time.
The pianist's friend Gregor Benko wrote about her hesitance over performing the core Austro-Germanic repertoire, and her wish, with the exception of Mozart, not to offer "poor work" when compared to this music's leading exponents. Nevertheless, de Larrocha's concerns belie her considerable accomplishments. Her ample-toned, "old school" Chopin and Schumann recordings abound in individual touches; her Scarlatti and Soler Sonatas are tart and crisp. The first (and better) of her two Bach-Busoni Chaconne recordings may well be this work's go-to version: the pianist summons up colossal, impeccably balanced sonorities that never splinter, and draws attention to the music's monumental design first and foremost.
Above all, de Larrocha was a pianist's pianist. After her November 1982 recital at New York's Avery Fisher Hall, Claudio Arrau, Vladimir Horowitz and John Browning waited outside the dressing room to congratulate her. "As she came off the elevator she saw us," Browning remembered, "then went directly in front of Horowitz (whom she had never met), knelt before him, and kissed both his hands. Horowitz beamed and said, 'My dear, you should have played more. I think there is more music in these little hands.'" There's no doubt that those "little hands" made a giant impact over the course of a long and fulfilling career.