In the liner notes to Gottschalk and Cuba, pianist Antonio Iturrioz remarks that, because of the six years Louis Moreau Gottschalk spent in Cuba and his facility with composing music in the Cuban musical idiom, ‘it might be appropriate to speak of him as a “Cuban composer”’. The synthesis of musical styles in so many of Gottschalk's compositions, including those Latin American-inspired works but also the rest of his oeuvre, have marked him as a central figure in the history of American music. Iturrioz comes to Gottschalk's works from a different angle than most performers of his music: as a native Cuban himself. This perspective works to shape an album that takes the music of Gottschalk as both a starting and ending place, both inspiring and inspired by the music of Cuban composers, who are also represented on the recording. The chronological program spans over 100 years of music from the island, some of it recorded here for the first time.

Iturrioz's extensive career has included an extended foray into piano music for the left hand, while he recovered from an injury to his right. He released two documentary films on the repertoire, The Art of the Left Hand and The Buddha of the Piano, the latter focused on Leopold Godowsky. Since his return to two-handed music, Iturrioz has focused on exploring the music of his homeland and transcribing a one-piano version of Gottschalk's first symphony, La nuit des tropiques, featured here as the first piece on the recording.

While Gottschalk's journal-cum-publication Notes of a Pianist records no commentary about the composition or performances of the work, he likely worked on it during his 1860 stay at Caimito, a remote region in the Cuban interior where composed several works during a two-month respite from his otherwise frantic touring schedule.Footnote ¹ In the liner notes, Gottschalk biographer S. Frederick Starr states: ‘Gottschalk originally composed this work for piano. In this recording, we hear it for the first time in the original one-piano version.’ Starr is referring more to the original circumstances of composition, which would have been at a piano, than to any known or intended performances of the work for solo piano. There is no evidence of any manuscripts for one piano in Gottschalk's hand, and a fragmentary one-piano version by the Portuguese composer-pianist Artur Napoleão dos Santos may have dated from their time together in Rio de Janeiro during the years before Gottschalk's death in 1869, much later than the Havana orchestral performances of the symphony. The two-piano transcription by Nicolás Ruiz Espadero, currently housed at the New York Public Library, has no annotations in Gottschalk's hand, and may have been created to increase the work's posthumous popularity and circulation. There is no existing evidence that Gottschalk ever envisioned the piece being publicly performed on piano, solo or otherwise.Footnote ² Therefore, Iturrioz's transcription should be heard more as a new interpretation or arrangement rather than as a return to ‘how the composer originally conceived it’, as claimed in the liner notes.

The rest of the album covers a loose chronological arc, featuring compositions for piano by Gottschalk's Cuban contemporaries Manuel Saumell and Nicolás Ruiz Espadero as well as his student Ignacio Cervantes. Dutch émigré Hubert de Black, who also knew Espadero, provides a connective thread to his student Ernesto Lecuona and his elder sister Ernestina Lecuona y Casado. Ernesto Lecuona is well known for his twentieth-century career as a pianist-composer, quite similar to Gottschalk's a century earlier. The recording ends with a final piece by Gottschalk, his El Cocoyé, based on the Cuban contradanza structure that infuses so many of the works in this collection.Footnote ³

Iturrioz's playing ranges from subtle and elegant to overwrought and at times muddy. The simpler compositions were the best executed. For example, his performance of Saumell's Recuerdos de Gottschalk, also a contradanza, features flawless connectivity between the two hands and exquisite sensitivity to the syncopations inherent in the work. His dynamic shadings give the work an evocative beauty that is a delight to hear. This track, as well as several others (but not all) on the recording, features a problematic recording/mixing issue, however: there is a distracting background noise that sounds almost like a sympathetic resonance on a snare drum in the room, a reverberation following many of the sounded tones.

The weakest tracks in terms of performance quality are the two movements of the symphony transcription. Iturrioz's reconstruction is problematic for several reasons, including the historical concerns outlined above. Listeners get a clear sense of Gottschalk's sentimental melodic style and romantic chromatic harmonies in the first movement, but the balance between the melody and accompaniment is often skewed, and the syncopations become hard to follow, as Iturrioz's liberal use of rubato sometimes overwhelms the rhythm. The second movement has its own challenges. To replace the battalion of percussion called for in the original manuscripts, Iturrioz employs ostinato accompanimental patterns in the left hand; considered along with the loss of timbral colour (especially Gottschalk's enormous brass section), the transcription loses much of the work's original appeal. To be fair, the original orchestral concerts featuring this symphony in Havana would have been similarly bombastic and muddy, with their performing forces numbering in the hundreds. In a way, then, Iturrioz's performance style hearkens back to the historic sounds of the first performances, although it can be challenging for twenty-first-century listeners to appreciate and enjoy this approach.

One of the highlights of this album is the premiere recording of Espadero's Sur la Tombe de Gottschalk. This piece, as well as Hubert de Blanck's Souvenir de la Havane: Mazurka de Salon and the renditions of the songs by the Lecuona siblings, are recorded here for the first time. Sheet music for several of the compositions, including those by Espadero, Cervantes and de Blanck, are fortunately available for free download on the website of the Petrucci Music Library, or the International Music Score Library Project (imslp.org). Espadero's score features extensive performance notes in Spanish about fingering, balance, colour and use of pedals. His composition is a remarkably sentimental homage to the memory of his friend, and Iturrioz does a marvellous job of capturing its range of emotions. The Lecuona songs that round out the album are light-hearted and quite enjoyable; Iturrioz might consider publishing his transcriptions of these works so that other pianists can perform them as well.

The grand finale of the collection is El Cocoyé, one of Gottschalk's most familiar pieces. Iturrioz identifies its use of contradanza form and cinquillo and habanera rhythms in the liner notes; it also employs tresillo at times. Gottschalk's signature figurations include rapidly repeated pitches with a leap up to the octave, Joplin-esque chord progressions, and dramatic shifts in musical style and mood; it is definitely a crowd-pleasing composition. Iturrioz's performance style is correspondingly dramatic, bombastic and dominating: a satisfying finish to a journey of an album.

The works for piano on this album both fill a significant historical and cultural lacuna and deliver an enjoyable listening experience. The same cannot be said, however, for the symphony transcription. While Iturrioz's passion for Gottschalk is both evident and contagious, his tendency toward superlatives in his liner notes can be problematic. He calls La nuit des tropiques ‘the first symphony written by an American composer’ and ‘the most revolutionary American concert music of the entire nineteenth century’. The first statement is simply false; one need only consult Douglas Shadle's thoroughly researched Orchestrating the Nation to find numerous earlier examples, such as those by Anthony Philip Heinrich, William Henry Fry or George Frederick Bristow. Iturrioz also calls this work ‘the first appearance of multiculturalism’, a statement that is misleading as well, and discounts many of the works that American and European artists were composing in both exotic and nationalistic musical styles.

In sum, it might have been better for Iturrioz to focus on the existing piano literature of Cuba rather than attempt to capture the essence of Gottschalk's symphony on a solo piano. While piano transcriptions of symphonies indeed abounded in the nineteenth century, their dual purpose – to expose works to wider audiences and to provide virtuosi with brilliant repertoire – seems somewhat superfluous in our age of musical abundance. The history of the Cuban contradanza is well worth performance and preservation without the addition of the symphony transcription; one hopes that more contradanza recordings await the talented Antonio Iturrioz in the future.