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At the same time, feeling myself to be at a disadvantage because of the few Hispanic composers with whose work I was familiar, I searched - without any real success - for music to match the quality of that performed by my French, German and Italian friends that could serve as a “patriotic” introduction for a Spanish violinist at those student events, which were rightly dominated by European works and composers. For my first “patriotic” audition I played Corelli´s well-known La Folia - a wonderful piece, but one that had nothing Spanish about it except the title. So, on my next attempt at flying the national flag, determined to perform music which was both Spanish and the equal of the masterpieces that we were all studying, I decided on the Tuscan-born Boccherini´s beautiful Trio Op. 34/2 in G major for two violins and cello, written by the composer in 1781 when he had been living in Spain for fifteen years. Once again, I had chosen a composer born outside Spain, but on this occasion I could confidently state that I was playing Spanish music, the truth of which was obvious in each of the four movements of the piece. At the risk of sounding sentimental, the classes and rehearsals devoted to Boccherini´s Trio and my subsequent performance of the work were for me a happy encounter with a hitherto undiscovered musical tradition, with a language and palette that I immediately recognised as very much my own, thanks to a new way of interpreting the music of the past. I did not know then - and perhaps I still do not fully understand - what it was about Boccherini’s music that evoked the mood of the streets of my native Madrid that he had walked some two hundred years before, the colour of the Madrid sky, that of Aranjuez, La Granja and all the places on the Iberian peninsula that the composer experienced, not as an outsider, but as intensely as one who had been born there.
Also about that time, thanks to the revolution in recording brought about by a new way of interpreting and listening to the music of the past, and the subsequent re-recording of a vast repertoire waiting to be rediscovered, I came across a couple of LPs that impressed me with the newness and freshness of their sound and style. Thanks to those records, I was led first to discover the “real” Boccherini, whose music was to become a passion and priority in my life: those LPs were the recording on the Telefunken/Teldec label of the Six Quartets, op. 32 by the Esterházy Quartet of Amsterdam, an ensemble directed by Jaap Schroeder, under whom I was studying, and a Seon album of the Six Quintets, op. 29 performed by Sigiswald and Wieland Kuijken, Alda Stuurop, Lucy van Dael and the cellist, Anner Bylsma, who a couple of years later recorded an outstanding album of Boccherini cellos sonatas, also on the Seon label, which was to have an enormous impact at the time, especially among practical musicians
A new way of interpreting and listening to Boccherini was emerging that would rapidly and powerfully contribute to banishing the hackneyed and outdated image of Boccherini as a composer characterised by a periwigged minuet and a concerto for cello and orchestra that had been paraded and capriciously revised by Friedrich Grützmacher in the late nineteenth century; it also dispelled the absurd caricature, which came to be accepted as dogma, of Boccherini as “the wife of Haydn” on account of the supposed sentimentality and ingenuousness of his music. It was not until the 1980s that the true worth of the composer of the famous minuet began to be recognised: he was not merely the author of pieces in the galant style, but a highly original and individual composer, only a fraction of whose work had until then been heard. Thanks to the general revision of interpretative traditions that followed in the wake of the new historically aware movement, Boccherini’s music was restored to its original freshness; when performed with clarity and precision, using the instruments, bows and techniques for which the composer wrote his music, it shone in all its clarity, delicacy and power. All this triggered my study and discovery of an unsuspected, multifaceted language which revealed not only a fascinating composer and his music, quite unlike the old rococo image that I had previously associated with them, but also a wealth of detail and elements in which I was beginning to recognise the subtle signs of a peculiarly Spanish approach to music that other, non-Spanish musicians were perhaps less able to recognise as vividly as I did. It was then, in fact, that I started to realise that the almost forty years that Boccherini lived in Spain had left an unmistakable mark on both the man and his music.
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