Spain occupies a special place in the artist’s enormous and wide-ranging repertoire of songs, and the country owes her a huge debt for opening the riches of its musical legacy for the entire world to admire. The selections offered here are, of course, not new. They originated between 1962 and 1969 and have been issued before, thanks to EMI’s periodic system of making recordings temporarily disappear just to re-enter the catalog again in new guises. In one respect, though, this particular sequence is unique in consisting only of selections with orchestral accompaniments. The orchestrations are nearly always by the composers; the five exceptions are credited to a certain Ferrer and Antoni Ros-Marba, invariably rich and flavorful.

With the exception of the prematurely deceased Granados (1867–1916), these are songs by 20th-century composers. All of them were to some extent influenced by Debussy, Falla, and Ravel, but their music remained Spanish (or Catalan in the case of Toldrá and Mompou) in harmony and color. Montsalvatge (1912–2002) is perhaps the most “modernist” in the lot, and his music was virtually unknown outside Spain until Victoria de los Angeles established his “Lullaby for a black baby” in the concert repertoire. It is the fourth of the Cinco canciones negras, the first strongly suffused by anti-Yankee sentiments, the third a sensuously inflected Habanera, and the fifth defiant in its vibrant Afro-American rhythms.

The Habanera rhythm re-emerges in Rodrigo”s “De los álamos vengo, madre,” the last and most memorable of the Cuatro madrigales amatorios in which the singer exhibits her melismatic magic. The same composer’s “Tríptic de Mossèn Cinto” comprises three songs in Catalan, with a joyous Christmassy feeling enlivened by vivid orchestral colors. Mompou’s three Catalan songs grouped under the title “The struggle of the dream” are impressionistic in words and feeling. The five Spanish songs of Oscar Esplá are light-hearted vignettes rendered with the soprano’s captivating intimacy that retains a fullness of sound at delicate piano levels. Eduardo Toldrá’s four songs are based on Catalan texts. The one entitled “Maig” (“May”) is likely to linger in the listener’s mind partly because of the subtle colors of the artist’s rendition.

The “tema popular” of the closing Madrigal is Montsalvatge’s orchestral treatment of “The song of the birds,” made popular many years ago by Pablo Casals’s cello rendition. The cello solo here is lovingly played by Lluís Claret. It was recorded at the closing ceremony of the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992. Victoria de los Angeles was 69 years old then. The sound, collected from many sources, is rich and admirably equalized. But, having said all of the above, it is the soprano’s unique art that makes it triumphant.

George Jellinek, FANFARE