The years 2016 and 2017 mark a double-anniversary for the great Spanish composer Enrique Granados: the 100th anniversary of his untimely death in 1916, and the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1867. Granados is often cited particularly as a composer for the piano, but his lesser-known songs are also a seminal achievement.

According to the British pianist-scholar Graham Johnson, they are “the first in Spanish music where the piano, long an established part of the song tradition in the rest of Europe, is permitted to enter into an important role in its own right.” In this sense, Granados’ songs are the first truly collaborative chamber music between voice and piano in Spanish classical music.

Soprano Laura Strickling and pianist Liza Stepanova explore two major works during their residency at Yellow Barn: Canciones amatorias, Granados’ most substantial collection of songs, a luminous, multifaceted celebration of Spanish culture that sets Renaissance Spanish love poems by Luis de Góngora, Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga, Lope Felix de Vega Carpio, and other anonymous poets, and a newly commissioned Spanish-language song cycle by Venezuelan-American composer Reinaldo Moya, a 21st-century response to Canciones amatorias.