While there’s plenty of Iberian flavour to this recording, including a flamenco cantor of properly reedy vocal depth, Mena never lets us forget that the work is in that Italian [verismo] tradition…[Fabiola Herrera’s] voice is up to every expressive nuance of the role…Faithless Paco is sung with the verve of a true rake by Aquiles Machado, and the smaller parts are all well cast.

Mena prises open textures and sonorities with great subtlety and attention to detail, so that we’re fully able to appreciate the shifting colours of Falla’s writing…The playing immaculately blends clarity with sensuousness, while the Coro de la Radio e Television Espanola sing with admirable warmth of tone…Yet at times it all feels fractionally too considered…Nancy Fabiola Herrera sounds sumptuous as Salud with her warm tone and full upper registers.

A fascinating and deeply poetic interpretation.

Mena proves adept at yoking [the work’s] disparate elements…Fabiola Herrera’s rioja-rich mezzo is totally identified with Falla’s heroine, in a carefully layered yet intense interpretation matching her conductor’s…Altogether her is the most satisfying Vida breve to have come my way for a long time. This is not said lightly, but I think that now – por fin - Frühbeck does have a rival.

This is a worthy successor to classic accounts by Victoria de los Angeles and Teresa Berganza. Nancy Fabiola Herrera (as Salud), Aquiles Machado (as Paco) and Mena are powerful advocates for this pinnacle of Spanish “verismo”

Juanjo Mena’s conducting is in turns spicy and sombre, capturing the air of passion and mystery that pervades the glamorous scoring.