Granada serenata isaac albeniz biography
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by Dave Belcher
Isaac Albéniz: A Portrait
This article offers a portrait of Isaac Albéniz. Around the new year a couple of members from Classical Guitar Corner Academy decided it would be great to dedicate more time to learning about guitar composers. So they made a New Year’s Resolution for 2019 to dedicate one month each to a different composer. This “Composer of the Month Club” would allow CGC Academy members to learn more about each composer’s history, achievements, and especially their music. Many members have been contributing and participating by sharing videos, posting tidbits of history of the featured composers, and interacting with other members’ insights. January featured the great Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz. So we thought it would be great to share a bit of background about this great composer with you. Thanks to the efforts of our brilliant Academy members (especially to Barbara and Mark!).
Albéniz and the Guitar
Isaac Albéniz is a
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Isaac Albéniz
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual (Spanish pronunciation: [iˈsak alˈβeniθ]) (29 May 1860, Camprodon – 18 May 1909, Cambo-les-Bains) was a SpanishCatalanpianist and composer best known for his piano works based on folk music idioms (many of which have been transcribed bygd others for guitar).
Life
Born in Camprodon, province of Girona, to Ángel Albéniz (a customs official) and his wife Dolors Pascual, Albéniz was a child prodigy who first performed at the age of fyra. At age seven, after apparently taking lessons from Antoine Marmontel, he passed the ingång examination for piano at the Paris Conservatoire, but he was refused admission because he was believed to be too young.[1]
His concert career began at the ung age of nine when his father toured both Isaac and his sister, Clementina, throughout no
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Suite Española No. 1
Isaac Albéniz’s Suite española, Op. 47, is a suite for solo piano. It is mainly composed of works written in 1886 which were grouped together in 1887, in honour of the Queen of Spain. Like many of Albeniz's works for the piano, these pieces depict different regions and musical styles in Spain.
Origins of the suite
[edit]The work originally consisted of four pieces: Granada, Cataluña, Sevilla and Cuba and was published in Madrid by Zozaya. The remaining four movements, Cádiz, Asturias, Aragón and Castilla, had been published in other editions and were added to the original four. The first appearance of the eight movement suite was in 1901 published by Dotesio. The editor Hofmeister republished the Suite española in 1912, after Albéniz's death with the four extra movements.[1]
The four additional pieces do not exactly reflect the geographical region to which they refer. A clear example of this is Asturias (Leyenda), whose