Home Recording Program notes: El Llanto de los Sueños draws on ideas and images from the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. The music suggests a dream-like nostalgia for the Andalusia of the nineteen-twenties and early thirties, when Manuel de Falla and Lorca were revitalising flamenco and local culture. The title is taken from the first line of Lorca's poem 'Las seis cuerdas' (The Six Strings) -- 'La guitarra hace llorar a los sueños' ('The guitar makes dreams weep'). The music borrows the colours and harmonies that Debussy and Ravel blended in their Spanish music -- a potent cocktail of Andalusian folk music, early jazz, 19th-century Romanticism, and French Impressionism. 'Alborada is based on Lorca's poem Baile, which depicts an old and slightly unhinged Carmen dancing through the streets of Seville at dawn, frightening the inhabitants. She is a little deranged and only half-remembers the dances of her younger days -- strains of her Habanera and Seguidilla struggle to be ! heard. Carmen's attention flits quickly from one memory to another and the character of the music darts about from mood to mood. She tries to recall the Seguidilla one last time, but she cannot form it properly in her mind. She gives up and starts her final dance, which builds to a frenzied climax
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