Ricardo Gallén is one of the leading Spanish classical guitarists of his generation — a musician admired equally for his complete Bach and Sor recordings and for his teaching at the Franz Liszt University of Music in Weimar. You can read more about him in our artist profile of Ricardo Gallén.
Here he plays Zambra Granadina by Isaac Albéniz on a remarkable historical instrument: a 1963 Hernández y Aguado.
About Zambra Granadina
The zambra is a dance of the Granada Roma community, at home in the cave dwellings of the Sacromonte hill facing the Alhambra — music with Moorish roots, hypnotic and darkly ornamented. Albéniz captured that world in Zambra Granadina, a piano piece often subtitled 'danse orientale': over a droning, rhythmically circling bass, a melody unfolds whose arabesques evoke the city's Moorish past.
Like Asturias and Granada from the Suite Española, the piece found its way onto the guitar almost inevitably — Albéniz's piano writing constantly imitates guitar idioms, so guitar transcriptions feel like a homecoming. Our Albéniz repertoire guide and our article on Isaac Albéniz and the classical guitar tell that story in full.
About Isaac Albéniz
Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) was the piano virtuoso who put Spanish music on the European map. His works transmute the country's regional musics — flamenco above all — into concert music of impressionist refinement, culminating in the piano suite Iberia. Although he wrote almost nothing for the guitar, hardly any composer has shaped the instrument's repertoire more deeply: his evocations of Spain sound so natural on six strings that generations of listeners have assumed they were written for it.
The Guitar: Hernández y Aguado, 1963
Hernández y Aguado was the Madrid workshop of Santos Hernández's tradition heirs Manuel Hernández and Victoriano Aguado — two craftsmen whose guitars from the 1950s and 60s are counted among the finest Spanish instruments of the twentieth century and are prized by collectors and concert artists alike. The 1963 example heard here brings exactly the colour this repertoire calls for: dark warmth, singing trebles and that unmistakable old-Madrid nobility. It is available in our shop — and you can read the extraordinary story of another instrument from this workshop in our article on a 1973 Hernández y Aguado.
Watch the Performance
For more Spanish repertoire, explore our overview of famous classical guitar pieces.
