TWO weeks ago, one of my younger brothers called me on phone from Ile-Ife, asking me whether I know an “Alicia de la Rosa”. “You mean the Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha”? I asked in turn. He answered affirmatively. “She had passed on to the Greater Beyond at the age 86. I heard the news from the BBC this morning”.
A towering figure in the world of classical music, so Alicia had finally left the flesh. She had been in failing health since breaking her hip two years ago before she finally bows out of the flesh.
For those of us that love classical music and remain conversant with the contemporary developments in this world of ethereal music, one cannot but hear of Alicia de Larrocha and her poetic touch and expressive mastery of this world through the piano, who made hundreds of recordings and helped, introduce the music of her native Spain to audience worldwide. There are few pianists in the world today that can boast of the length, breadth and depth of mastery of Alicia de Larrocha in the world of classical music. She would be remembered for bringing an elegant restraint to her interpretations of composers as diverse as Johann Sebastian Bach and Manuel de Falla.
Larrocha distinguished herself as an infant prodigy who went on to become one of the greatest musicians of her era, after putting in 75 years of public appearances. She retired just six years ago. The petite pianist, who measured just less than five foot (1.52m), won praises for her technique and judgment of tempo. As well as her performances of Mozart and Rachmaninov, she was regarded as unrivalled in her interpretation of Spanish composers like Isaac Albeniz, de Falla and other Spanish composers such as Enrique Granados, and Federico Mompou were considered definitive and prompted Washington Post music critic Paul Hume to crown her “the unchallenged monarch of Spanish piano music.”
Alicia de Larrocha y de la Calle, a Spanish Catalan pianist, widely considered to be one of the greatest of her generation, was born in Barcelona in May 23, 1923 and began playing at the age of two. She gave her first recital at the age six, and made her orchestral debut when she was 11, performing as a soloist for the Madrid Symphony Orchestra. Although famed as a champion of Spanish music, her teacher Frank Marshall forbade her to play it before she was 15.
Through the years, she collaborated with conductors Michael Tilson Thomas, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos and Sir Colin Davis, with the Guarneri and Tokyo string quartets and with her childhood friend, operatic soprano Victoria de los Angeles.
Larrocha won two Grammy Awards (the first being in 1975 and the second in 1992- the later at the age of 70)) and countless other honors. She maintained homes in Switzerland, New York and Barcelona, but she professed not to care about prizes or fame. She received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1994, Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in Paris in 1988 and the Paderewski Memorial Medal. She won a UNESCO Prize in 1995. She received honorary degrees from universities in Michigan, Middlebury College, Vermont, and Carnegie Mellon.
In 1950, she married Juan Torra, a piano teacher who stayed home in Barcelona to run their music conservatory and care for their two children while de Larrocha went on tour. Her husband died in 1982; a son and daughter survive her.
“There opened before me a new world of poetry and dreams,” she told Time magazine in 1967. “I had the sensation that this music formed part of myself, and now I would never be able to free myself from its influence.”
“It was Bach and Mozart that I played,” she later recalled. “This is a necessary base for a pianist. You cannot play Spanish music without it. “Spanish music is very, very, very hard. Young people come to me and think they can play it right away. But Spanish music must have the right rhythm, just as Bach and Mozart must have the right rhythm. “If you cannot play Bach and Mozart well, you cannot play Spanish music well.”
De Larrocha made numerous recordings of solo piano repertoire and in particular the works of composers of her native Spain. She is best known for her recordings of the music of Manuel de Falla, Enrique Granados and Isaac Albéniz, as well as her 1967 recordings of Antonio Soler’s keyboard sonatas. De Larrocha was equally renowned for her performances from the standard classical repertoire, including works by Ludwig van Beethoven, Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and made more than 80 appearances at New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival.
It was 1947 after the World War II before she would play outside her home country, and she made her British debut in 1953. It was two years later that she was able to take her first trip to the United States at the invitation of famed conductor Alfred Wallenstein, and a tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The trip launched her into stardom. After this breakthrough, she gained recognition as one of the world’s most outstanding pianists.
In 1959 she became director of Barcelona’s Academia Marshall, where she had studied and tutored as a youngster.
By this time, her affinity with Spanish music was becoming more widely recognized, and her performances of Albeniz’s Iberia and Granados’s Goyescas won particular praise.
She recorded Iberia four times, and gave premieres of several Spanish works, including book four of Mompou’s Musica Callada and Montsalvatge’s Concierto Breve, which is dedicated to her.
In 1966, the New York Times’s notoriously hard-to-please critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that she was “pianistically flawless, with infallible fingers, brilliant sonorities, and steady rhythm, everything. . . . She is a wonderful pianist, and more: She is an artist.” Reuters referred to her as “the greatest Spanish pianist in history” and Time called her “one of the world’s most outstanding pianists” The Guardian called her “the leading Spanish pianist of her time”. The Barcelona Symphony Orchestra had