Fantasía Bética

Fantasía Bética (or Fantasia Bætica, in English Betic Fantasy) is a composition for piano by Manuel de Falla written in 1919. It is an evocation of the old Roman province of Baetis, the southern part of Spain which now constitutes most of Andalusia.

It was commissioned by and dedicated to the Polish virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein. He planned to perform it in Barcelona in 1919 but had not learnt it sufficiently well. He instead gave the first performance in New York on 20 February 1920. He played it a handful of times but dropped it from his repertoire, and never recorded it.[1]