The Year That Never Was
in Romanian pianist
Matei Varga
's title here is 2020; he writes of how he came to embrace the COVID-era isolation and explored the work of
Ernesto Lecuona
, a composer about whom he had previously known little. The output of Cuban composer
Lecuona
is sometimes categorized as salon music, that gray area between classical and popular, and while it includes a few classical hits like the opening
Andalucia
(from the
Suite espanola
), much of his large production of some 600 works remains little explored. Here, the excerpts from the
Danzas cubanas del siglo XIX
and
Danzas Afro-Cubanas
will be worth the price of admission for
fans, but there are more arrows in
Varga
's quiver. He wants to expand the notion of salon music to include some of its predecessors, not only
Chopin
but going back as far as
Domenico Scarlatti
. One can quibble with some of his choices; he has a couple of
Gershwin
pieces, but the roots of
's music are different, and
Scott Joplin
, a close musical cousin to
, might have made a better choice. Yet
's segues are convincing, and his concept is flexible enough to include offbeat items like
Mily Balakirev
's
Spanish Melody
and Romanian composer
Andrei Tudor
Rondo alla Crazy
, which
Tudor
sent to
via social media during the pandemic. That pandemic seems to have produced a boomlet in recordings of salon music, which is probably understandable, and
's release is a novel take on the idea. ~ James Manheim