Tonadas

The complete piano songbook of Joaquín Nin-Culmell

Tonadas is Pablo Martínez's debut album and one of his signature concert programs: Joaquín Nin-Culmell's four volumes of settings of traditional Spanish songs and dances — forty-eight miniatures that together trace an intimate map of Spain; Galicia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands, and many more regions. Released with IBS Classical in 2026 and recorded at the Manuel de Falla Auditorium in Granada.

★★★★★ — Melómano

“Necessary, sensitive, and musically honest.”

— David Pellejer

The Program

Across four volumes, Nin-Culmell gathered the folk melodies of Spain's regions — the Basque Country, Castile, Galicia, Asturias, Murcia, the Balearics, Catalonia, Extremadura, the Canary Islands — and distilled each into a brief, refined piano piece. The result is a quiet geography of Spanish popular song, melody filtered through a sensibility that stands in the lineage of Falla, Albéniz, and Mompou. Heard complete, the forty-eight pieces become something larger than the sum of their parts: a recollected Spain, reassembled from fragments of memory, distance, and identity.

In performance, the program can be presented as a full recital or in a conferencia-concierto (lecture-concert) format, with spoken introductions that open the music to audiences encountering Nin-Culmell for the first time — particularly suited to cultural institutions, universities, and Spanish heritage programming.

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About the Composer

Joaquín Nin-Culmell (1908–2004) was a Spanish-American composer whose work bridged the musical worlds of Spain and the Americas. His Tonadas, written across four volumes, rank among the most personal contributions to twentieth-century Spanish piano repertoire — and remain, even now, too rarely heard in their entirety.