The main challenge for pianists taking on Granados’s Goyescas is making both literal and musical sense out of the composer’s abundant expressive and tempo indications. For all of Javier Perianes’s exemplary articulation in the opening salvo, ‘Los requiebros’, his rubatos often yield episodic results, in contrast to the incisive spontaneity conveyed in Garrick Ohlsson’s perky inner voices and guitar-like arpeggiations (Hyperion, 4/12). While his measured pacing throughout ‘Coloquio en la reja’ is remarkably sustained, I miss Alicia de Larrocha’s emotional variety and overall momentum. The pianist clips the détaché percussive evocations of ‘El fandango de candil’, mincingly holding back the tempo, while a veritable street procession emerges from José Menor’s brisker pace and inflective thrust (IBS, 12/17).

Perianes ruminates over the opening section of ‘Quejas, o La maja y el ruiseñor’ to the point where the composer’s poco rallentando and a tempo directives go for nothing, setting the stage for a rambling seven and a half minutes; compare his coda’s earthbound trills to Cristina Ortiz’s soaring and feathery recording (Collins Classics, 12/90) and you’ll hear what I mean. On the other hand, Perianes falls victim to his literalism in the ‘Epílogo’, where the spiky staccatos get stuck in the mud. By contrast, Menor goes wild with the tempos, yet the music comes to colourful and idiomatic life.

Yet everything comes dramatically together for Perianes in ‘El amor y la muerte’, the cycle’s longest and most substantial piece. He’s on great form, from his organic integration of previously heard motifs to his carefully scaled dynamics, controlled textural layering and assiduously proportioned tempo fluctuations. Perianes’s inspired way with this movement plus his invigorating El pelele are worth the disc’s price, as well as prominent places on one’s streaming or download lists. However, José Menor’s Granados remains the top recent version of reference.