★★★☆☆
Snaking through the concrete jungle, wind biting at my ankles and ears, I felt in the mood for some Spanish heat, which was what this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert promised. Initially, disappointment loomed. The trouble lay partly in the opening work: Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo (“Love, the Magician”), performed not in its usual ballet version, but in its original, longer form as a gypsy entertainment for flamenco singer, dancers and chamber orchestra. The cherished highlights still arrived, but so did musical thumb-twiddling.
Other reasons for the cooler temperature? Well, Josep Pons’s clinical conducting didn’t help, for it emphasised the lean precision of Falla’s style rather than its burning passions. I also blame the crazy decision to amplify María Toledo’s voice, even though only 15 musicians sat around her. Surely flamenco singers should sound pungent enough to strip paint from walls, not be muffled by electronic cotton wool.
Luckily, everything changed the moment the expanded orchestra launched into a concert staging of Enrique Granados’s joyously nationalistic Goyescas, possibly the only opera worked up from a piano suite. This rarity, inspired by Goya’s paintings, also includes one of opera’s most garrulous choruses: for two of the three tableaux the assembled throng barely shuts up. The BBC Singers had a ball, chuntering through deliciously jaunty counterpoint occasionally suggesting Bach gone wrong. I missed them when they were silent.
Yet there were always other attractions. As the heroine of the plot’s simple love triangle, Nancy Fabiola Herrera may have overdone the writhing hands, but her full-bodied soprano conquered me, while the tenor Gustavo Peña pierced the air as her suspicious lover. José Antonio López oozed character as the toreador Paquiro. Everything here went with a Spanish swing, and I wasn’t cold at all.