Chequered histories are by no means uncommon in the world of opera, but the vicissitudes of Pepita Jimenez – the only one of Albeniz’s numerous attempts at a stage work to have achieved any real success – have been more wildly complicated than most. Though written in English to a libretto by his generous wealthy patron, Francis Money-Coutts, it was first performed in an Italian translation in Barcelona in 1896 (the same year, be it noted, as La boheme). Not satisfied with it, Albeniz twice extensively revised and rescored it for production in German and French. After his death a different French translation was used in Paris in 1923, only for this to be retranslated into Italian for a new production in Barcelona three years later. As Albeniz habitually thought in terms of the piano and orchestration never came naturally to him, in 1964 Pablo Sorozabal took it upon himself virtually to recompose the original for a production in Spanish. The present recording of extracts, reverting to the original English, marks yet another version: we are told that Josep Soler has “redistributed certain of its musical elements” though “scrupulously respecting the musical ideas as well as the orchestral conception of the period”. So it’s anybody’s guess how close this comes to Albeniz’s original, particularly since various sections from the two acts have been sewn together in an artificial continuity.
Coutts’s flat-footed text (to call him a “sensitive poet”, as the notes here do, is ludicrously far from the truth) did little to breathe life into the rudimentary plot – the heroine is in love with Luis, a young seminarist, who, after agonies of conscience, abandons his calling when she threatens to take her own life in despair – but Albeniz’s music for it is described in Grove as a “masterpiece”. With the best will in the world, I find this claim difficult to substantiate: there is, however, delicate charm and a gentle melancholy in purely orchestral sections (heard at best in the chaconne-like introduction to Act 2 scene 2 and in a dance by children) and, at times, some lyrical flowering, as in Pepita’s meditation at the end of Act 1. There is more characterization in the music for Luis, well sung by Francesc Garrigosa; but overall Albeniz fails to generate melodic lines of any length, and his treatment of words (often repeating them mechanically) is clumsy. That makes less of a loss their indistinctness in the singing of Susan Chilcott, a warm-voiced soprano with a rich and well-focused upper register. (Her first entry in Act 2, incidentally, is on track 6, not 5 as shown.) The orchestral playing is acceptable enough, though the balance is very bass-light. All in all, something of a disappointment; but at least it throws some light on a hitherto all but unknown area of Albeniz’s output.'