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I've heard Albeniz's Corpus Christi in Seville from his Iberia Suite for the first time recently and immediately fell in love with this piece. I'm thinking of learning it... someday. This piece sounds difficult, but is it as difficult as it sounds? Have any of you played this piece before? And if so, what are the most difficult aspects of this piece? I look forward to hearing from people about this.

I did my doctoral lecture recital on Evocacion, El Puerto, Corpus, and Triana!

It's an amazing piece, and about as hard as it sounds - nothing particularly awkward or strange - EXCEPT the G Major section a few pages before the end. That spot is torture - I had to redistribute some of the notes to a different hand to make the voicing clearer. It's REALLY hard. I found that spot to be more difficult than anything in Triana, and definitely beyond the technique required in Evocacion and El Puerto. One thing about Iberia, though - every one of those pieces is worth the work. It's an amazing set!

The title of the piece refers to the Corpus Christi festival in Seville, Spain. Every year, a parade marches through the streets of Seville (the opening of the piece and similar spots). Every now and then, the procession stops, and someone will offer a "saeta" (literally, an "arrow of song") - usually a hymn of praise to Christ or the virgin. (In the piece, this is the octave melody with all the alternating chords above.) The closing section of the piece is "cante jondo" style - the original "deep song" which is central to gypsy Flamenco music.

If you'd like to hear what a real Corpus Christi parade and saeta sound like, I took the liberty of uploading a clip of an old field recording of one:

http://www.kreisleriana.com/audio/saeta.mp3

Enjoy!

Kreisler,

At the school where I take my piano class and my music fundamentals class, they have free concerts every Thursday. On April 10th, a young women played those same pieces, Evocation,El Puerto, Corpus Christi, and Triana. She also played Rondena, Almeria, and Malaga and Albaicin.
She was amazing. She had really long slender fingers. She was playing one hand above the other throughout a lot of those pieces. I swear she had an extra pair of hands there somewhere. LOL. Her name is Anne-Lise Longuemare. A student at UCLA studying with a Professor Walter Ponce. I don't know if you know him or not. Anyway, I thought I'd share that with you, since you mentioned you'd mentioned you did your doctural lecture on Iberia.

pdolce