Allegro - Lento - Vivace

Falla's effervescent Concerto, composed for Wanda Landowska, always struck me as re-invented Scarlatti bordering on the satiric, as Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, for example, does for Mozart. When I played it in Ottawa with Eduardo Mata (1986), he said "nothing of the sort. This is Falla's greatest work, and it is a very serious, very contemporary work." While still processing why a contemporary work had to be serious, I learned quite a bit from him about how dissonant the piece really is, and how that element outweighs some of the others. The middle movement portrays (in five minutes) a 3-hour procession celebrating the June 3, 1926 holiday In Festo Corporis Christi. In this display of brilliant color, dazzling design and spiritual excitement, the immensely heavy floats are carried by dozens of burly men, to the accompaniment of singing and chanting. The effect is riveting, and the apparent appearance of the body of Jesus (the cello solo), the climactic point.