Alongside Manuel de Falla’s only work for piano and orchestra, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, and his finest work for solo piano, the exuberant, endlessly inventive Fantasia Baetica, Luis Fernando Pérez places suites from the two ballets El Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) and El Amor Brujo (Love, the Magician). It’s mostly vivid, highly coloured music that needs real flair and presence in performance, but though the cover of Pérez’s disc makes great claims for him as a Falla interpreter (“the only Spanish pianist since Alicia de Larrocha to have championed his native repertory with such passion”), these performances generally seem tepid and undercharacterised. It does not help that the recording level on the disc seems very low, but even when that’s boosted, nothing really comes alive; you only need to listen to de Larrocha herself in Nights in the Gardens and the Fantasia, or to Javier Perianes in those works in his Falla collection for Harmonia Mundi, to realise what is missing here.
