Spanish Serenades

“These guitars are extremely intimate, very delicate, very fragile and full of colours,” Raphael tells Apple Music Classical. “They’re warm, mellow and super sensitive, so whatever you do, it comes through.” The guitars he is describing are the ones he plays on his album Spanish Serenades. They once belonged to the great Spanish composers Isaac Albéniz, Miguel Llobet and Francisco Tárrega, and understandably are usually kept under lock and key by collectors in Italy and Paris. Feuillâtre has had them temporarily liberated, however, to bring a unique sound to his programme of popular guitar works. “I wanted to have a very fresh interpretation, and these instruments just guided me,” he says. With this recording, Feuillâtre moves from the late 17th- and 18th-century French and German repertoire of his DG debut, Visages baroques, to the sun-drenched melancholy of late 19th- and early 20th-century Spanish works. Rooted in the nationalistic sentiments of the time, these pieces celebrate the sounds of Spain, including the flamenco flourishes of Albéniz’s “Asturias. Leyenda” from Suite española which opens the programme, to the Arab and Moorish styles of Tárrega’s Capricho árabe that the composer had heard on his travels through Andalusia and North Africa. As well as drawing from the folk traditions, these pieces are highly virtuosic, often demanding great dexterity, whether in the tremolo repeated-note figuration of Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra or the beautiful Preludes the same composer wrote for his students. As with the harpsichord repertoire of his previous disc, not all of the works here were originally conceived for guitar, and Feuillâtre includes his own arrangements, performing Granados’ “Andaluza” (originally conceived for piano), for example, alongside violinist María Dueñas. “I just want my own scores with the exact notes I want to play,” he says. One of the reasons Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is so difficult to perform, he adds, is because its composer was not a guitarist. “As a performer, you can tell,” he says. “It’s especially challenging in the third movement, which is very fast. At the same time, there are many chords that are really not convenient, so your fingers have to cross everything very quickly.” Feuillâtre grew up listening to and learning from the greats: Andrés Segovia, Paco de Lucía and Narciso Yepes have all influenced his approach, but there is plenty of scope for fresh ideas, he says. “In the Concierto I tried, especially in the cadenzas, to do something that is at the edge of the limit of what we can do with a classical guitar—moving more towards the flamenco sound.” Does he listen to flamenco ever? “Of course, I’ve been in Spain many times,” he says, “and every time, I go to see a flamenco. I love that style of music. When I was young, I wanted to play the flamenco guitar, but it’s very different—you need another instrument, and it ruins the nail.” But the joy and heartbreak that fuels flamenco are all here in these Serenades. Take Llobet’s “El testament d’Amelia”, for example, based on a Catalan folk song that captures the final hours of a princess who has been poisoned by her jealous stepmother; or the same composer’s “Cançó del lladre”, about a thief looking back on his life after being sentenced to death. Feuillâtre makes the sorrow sing, not least in the “Adagio” of the Concierto—a work that was written in 1939, after the Spanish civil war and the rise of Francisco Franco—which evokes the happy days of Rodrigo’s honeymoon with Turkish pianist Victoria Kamhi in Aranjuez as well as his devastation at the miscarriage of their first child. “That second movement in particular,” says Feuillâtre, “It just goes straight to the heart.”