Cuba’s Ernesto Lecuona was a virtuoso pianist and composer-songwriter who was equally at home in concert halls and popular clubs. For all his work in Afro-Cuban genres, Lecuona is best remembered for a suite rooted in the Flamenco sounds of southern Spain, or Andalucía, as the region is known in Spanish. He published the original version for piano in 1928, but the memorable tunes have cropped up in all manner of transcriptions, especially the finale, Malagueña. 
 
Orpheus commissioned Jannina Norpoth to create this orchestration for small orchestra, building on the relationship that began when she and her longtime friend Jessie Montgomery collaborated on an Orpheus arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons. An improvising violinist and self-taught arranger, Norpoth follows her ears more than any formal process of music theory and orchestration, seeking to create the sounds that she imagines the composer might have desired. In this ensemble with six woodwind and brass players, Norpoth treats those individuals as a collection of soloists. She also calls upon the full palette of string sounds she knows and uses in her career with the genre-defying PUBLIQuartet, as in the guitar-like strumming and airy harmonics doubled by piccolo in the second movement, Andaluza. 

© 2023 Aaron Grad