In their ancestral, unstable balance, Spain and France continue to be, even today, as they have always been, that is to say, rivals and sisters, both very distant and very close, and both mutually admired and hated. Like Apollo and Dionysius, faith and reason, refinement and baseness, both nations perfectly embody the most opposed clichés of Western culture. The fact of being neighbours and their cultural dynamism have built, over the centuries, a broad plateau that their respective artists have been able to raise on both sides of the Pyrenees to soften the physical and mental barriers between both peoples and overcome a simplistic and limited vision of these two wonderfully complex realities.
As the fruits of the most exotic vision of the other, and, sometimes, of a very deep immersion into the neighbouring cultural roots, the musical images that we have inherited for posterity from the composers of both countries are really different: portraits of an extraordinary beauty, which, like the frames in a film, appear as momentary elements of a very complex and long artistic interaction. This is why it is natural that the repertoire that Margarita Escarpa has wisely selected for this CD preserves many links that provide it with unity and coherence. The most important link is the one that united the guitar (the icon of Spanish culture) with the figure of Claude Debussy (French composer par excellence, precursor of a new music that was to completely change European musical traditions).