After completing his Goyescas, the pianist and composer Enrique Granados wrote that he had happily succeeded in "writing something significant". And who would want to contradict him? The six scenes, some of them very extensive, are based on drawings by the great Spanish artist Francisco Jose de Goya. They form a cycle that is glowing with inspiration from the first to the last bar, and whose technical difficulties achieve the kind of transcendence that Franz Liszt in particular had achieved in the 19th century. His technical prowess is entirely devoted to picturesque and highly emotional expression, from humorous whimsy to the most grave of tragedies. The young Dina Stojilkovic has recorded Goyescas for cpo on a Steinway B built in 1895, an instrument that Granados might well have had under his virtuoso fingers at the time.
