Recuerdos de la Alhambra (Memories of the Alhambra) is a classical guitar piece composed in 1896 by Spanish composer and guitarist Francisco Tárrega[1]. He wrote it in Granada.
A virtuoso on his instrument, Tárrega was known as the "Sarasate of the guitar". His repertoire included many original compositions for the guitar (Capricho Árabe, Danza Mora, et al) as well as guitar arrangements of works written for other instruments by composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin and Felix Mendelssohn. As with his friend Isaac Albéniz and many of their Spanish contemporaries, Tárrega had an interest in combining the prevailing Romantic trend in classical music with Spanish folk elements, which he did with Recuerdos de la Alhambra and his transcriptions for guitar of several of Albeniz's piano pieces, notably the fiery Asturias (Leyenda).[2]
Recuerdos de la Alhambra shares a title with the Spanish language translation of Washington Irving's 1832 book, Tales of the Alhambra, written during the author's four-year stay in Spain. It contains extensive examples of the tremolo technique often performed by advanced classical guitarists.
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Recuerdos de la Alhambra has been used as title or incidental music several times, including the soundtrack for René Clément's Forbidden Games (as played by Narciso Yepes), for The Killing Fields (under the title Étude), and in the film Sideways.
Performed and arranged by Jonathon Coudrille, it was used as the title music for the British television series Out of Town.
Performed by Pepe Romero, it was also used in the Season 6 episode of The Sopranos entitled Luxury Lounge.
Ruggiero Ricci created an arrangement of this piece published by Ovation Press.[3]
Gideon Coe on BBC Radio 6Music uses this tune as a musical background at approximately the half-way point of his evening weekday show.[4]
The piece showcases the challenging guitar technique known as tremolo, wherein a single melody note is plucked repeatedly by the ring, middle and index fingers in such rapid succession that the result is an illusion of one long sustained tone. The thumb plays a counter-melody on the bass between melodic attacks. Many who hear this piece initially in a non-live setting can mistake it for a duet rather than a challenging solo effort.
The A-section of the piece is written in a minor key, and the B-section is written in the major key of the same root (more specifically, A-minor and A-major). This gives the song a melancholy feel in the beginning, and then it resolves to an uplifting feel. This device is used in other Spanish guitar songs as well, such as the anonymous Spanish Romance (also known simply as Romance or Spanish Folk Song).[5]
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