Impressions of Iberia

We're excited to share with you our debut album, Impressions of Iberia, published by Da Vinci Classics. Recorded near Brescia, Italy, in summer 2023, it features a programme focused on the cultural crosspollination between Spain and France around the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The album opens with three folkloric dances from a lesser-known Spanish composer, Enrique Fernández Arbós. Their success outside of Spain exemplifies the fascination that the Iberian aesthetic sparked in Europe during the composer's lifetime. This is followed by a later work by another Spanish composer, Joaquín Turina, who was heavily influenced by the French impressionists and seamlessly integrated his cultural heritage in their idiom. Ravel's piano trio, one of the cornerstones of the repertoire, closes the track-list with a scintillating display of musical imagination. Listen out for the almost hypnotic opening of the first movement, where Ravel makes explicit use of the Basque zortziko rhythm from the north of the peninsula.

In this album, the vivid colours of Spanish folklore blend with the luminescence of French impressionism in a way that draws inevitable parallelism with the visual arts. We chose to feature a painting by Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla, La Última Copla, as the cover artwork for the album, as it encapsulates the gesture and poetry permeating the music. Click here for a high resolution image of the painting.