FERNSTROM: String Quartets Nos. 3, 6 and 8

Esplá's output was melodic, with considerable French influence. Levante, one of the two major works on the disc, could well be viewed as a Spanish equivalent of the music of Erik Satie.

Oscar Esplá was born at Alicante on the south coast of Spain on August 5, 1886. His parents fostered an obvious affinity with music, and provided piano lessons at a very early age. Apart from these lessons in his hometown, he received the normal school education, and passed examinations to go to university in Barcelona, where he was to study engineering. That he remained there for eight years was simply due to the fact that he managed to also enroll for a doctorate in philosophy and arts. The same year that he qualified as an engineer, 1911, he entered an orchestral work, Suite lavan-tina, in the Vienna National Music Society competition, and a totally unknown young man was awarded the international prize. Saint-Saëns was on the jury and made so many encouraging comments that Esplá rejected his career as an engineer, and he went to Paris to study with Saint-Saëns. His musical reputation in his native country was enhanced in 1930, when he was appointed professor at the Madrid Conservatory, where he was later to become their director.

The Spanish Civil War found his politics on the losing side, and after the Second World War he lived for a time in Brussels, where was appointed director of the Laboratoire Musical Scientifique. Returning to his native land in 1953, he received academic appointments and honors at an alarming rate, and in those postwar years he became the most influential musician in Spain. In 1958 Alicante honored him with the appointment as the first director of the newly constructed Oscar Espla Conservatory. He died in Madrid in 1976, leaving a very diverse catalog of works including several operas, ballets, orchestral works, choral (including a Requiem and cantatas), chamber music, and a considerable quantity of piano music.

His output was melodic, and though we find considerable French influence in many of his scores, his major inspiration comes from popular Spanish music, and it is this immediate attraction that permeates much of his output. The earliest work on the disc dates from 1907, the Romanza Antigua (Ancient Romance), a short cameo that points to a composer of the future. Five years later came Crepusculum, and the advances made were considerable, the score also pointing to his own brilliance as a pianist. In three linked and contrasting sections, not one note is superfluous, and it has a formal perfection not always repeated in his later works.

Tres Movimientos and Cantos date from 1930, and here we find Esplá writing in a popular Spanish dance style. Each score contains three contrasting tempos, the final section of the Three Movements a seductive Paso Doble. Levante, one of the two major works on the disc, was composed the following year. In 10 brief sections it could well be viewed as a Spanish equivalent of the music of Erik Satie.

There is a gap of 18 years to the Sonata Espa?ola of 1949, during which time it seems he wrote little piano music. Prefaced "In memoriam to Frédéric Chopin," it contains a Mazurka with a distinctly modern gait.

The performances from the American-educated pianist, Pedro Carboné, are extremely fine. His Spanish roots bring a very idiomatic atmosphere to the music, while technically he has all the equipment for the more demanding sections. He also has that ability to give the shortest of pieces a significant substance, particularly valuable in such works as Levante, which could all too easily become episodic.

The disc cover describes this as the first volume in the complete piano works of Esplá, and I will much look forward to making further acquaintance with his music. If you have a chance try band 15, the first movement of Tres Movimientos, which will give you a perfect taste for Esplá's happy and uncomplicated style.

-- David Denton, FANFARE [1/1999]

CAPLET: Le miroir de Jesus

TVEITT: Piano Music, Vol. 1

Jörg Demus, born in Austria in 1928, has became one of today's best-known pianists, though his work as a composer has received rather less attention. He came from a musical background and entered the Vienna State Academy of Music at the age of 11 to study piano, organ, conducting, and composing. He later moved to Paris, his piano tutors being a distinguished quintet: Walter Gieseking, Wilhelm Kempff, Edwin Fischer, Yves Nat, and Benedetti-Michelangeli. He was to follow a career as both soloist and accompanist, and in addition to his prolific public appearances, he has made more than 350 recordings.

Joseph Marx was his composition mentor, and his works have mainly been in the field of chamber and instrumental music, many of them involving the cello, the rudiments of which he learned as a young man. The major stimulus, however, was Jörg's cello-playing brother, and his easy use of the instrument points to a composer well versed in its singing qualities.

The inspiration for the present disc also comes from the poet Paul Verlaine. The earliest work is the Sonate poétique using Verlaine's poem, Art poétique, the composer intending the music to cover all human emotions from sadness to the sunny and vivacious. It is in four movements, the second a hunting scherzo, and the third a deeply moving prayer of homage.

Verlaine's poem Crimen Amoris, with the opening words "And it is night, night blue with a thousand stars," was the thought in Demus's mind when writing the short work, Amour. This poem of exotic beauty is reflected in a highly Romantic and serene score. The Cello Sonata was originally written for viola, the mood being one of sadness, with the second movement inspired by Verlaine's Chant d'automne. Again in four movements, the first, "Sunset," is over half as long again as the total of the remaining movements, and is a miniature tone-poem in itself. "Nuit d'étoiles" has the bizarre story of having been a piano trio, but when at the last minute the violinist could not take part in a performance in Japan, Demus hurriedly wrote the whole score for cello and piano duo.

He is a melodic writer, looking backward to the period of Romantic composition when music was a thing of rapt beauty. There is no challenge to the listener, though those passages in the cello's upper stratosphere would tax the finest performer. The German-born cellist Maria Kliegel, onetime winner of the Rostropovich Competition, produces an endless flow of the most beautiful tone from her Stradivarius, though one wishes the disc's producer had asked for a few more takes to erase those moments when you feel uncomfortable with the cello intonation. With the performances in the hands of the composer, the outcome should represent his view of the music. That would indicate a sadness deep in his soul, with a nostalgia for a period of music that passed many decades ago. His playing is ideally balanced with the cello, the piano often dancing around the slower moving cello part. I particularly warmed to Kliegel's impassioned account of the opening movement of the Sonata, those burnished tones deep in the instrument quite ravishing.

The recording, made in Austria in 1996, appears to have come from a very small and confined studio that brings clarity yet misses that tonal bloom high on the cello you feel this music must have. An essential purchase? Maybe not, but I enjoyed it.

-- David Denton, FANFARE [11/1998]

HALFFTER: Prelude for Madrid '92 / Daliniana

AVSHALOMOFF: Piano Concerto / Symphony No. 2 / Elegy

HELLMESBERGER: Waltzes and Quadrilles from Vienna

REVIEWS:
American Record Guide (7-8/00, p.75) - Recommended
Fanfare (1-2/00, p.195) - "...Fine performances from the Moscow Symphony Orchestra....Nadine Asin makes a lovely job of the Flute Concerto, and Avshalomov 'fils' and 'petit fils' keep the music moving along brightly and buoyantly..."

It seems inconceivable to this listener that in the space of a single year we would be treated to the luxury of two alternative recordings of the chef d'oeuvre of a short-lived but very talented French composer—the Symphony in A of 1930 premiered by none other than Pierre Monteux and written by Pierre-Octave Ferroud (1900-36). (The first recording, on the Auvidis label, was reviewed by this writer earlier in 1998.)

The best news about this Marco Polo release is the presence of some minor but enjoyable shavings from Ferroud's well-worn workbench, all receiving their first recordings, of course: a very quick but galvanizing Fanfare for the Herald; the piquant March from the composite ballet L'Eventail de Jeanne (which was actually once available on complete recordings of this work); two gently appealing early pieces—the Sarabande and Andante cordial, the latter bearing probably the most attractive if conventional melody by Ferroud ever recorded; and a short suite in three continuous parts from a "black comedy" opera buffa after Chekhov—Chirurgie ("Surgery")—a product of Ferroud's brief maturity from the late 20s.

In addition, on this disc is a major work, the Serenade of 1927, which it shares with the Auvidis release. This almost pseudo Neoclassic piece in three movements (Berceuse, Pavane, and Spirituel) is also somewhat ambivalent in tone, veering from the mordant to the mischievous in an emotionally kaleidoscopic manner.

While there's little to choose between the two treatments of the Symphony (both project well the music's high-powered, almost feral energy), this second recording perhaps doesn't quite catch its subtle gradations of tone, though this German orchestra from Württemberg plays these scores with remarkable assurance: It's no surprise to learn they often specialize in French repertoire.

-- Paul A. Snook, FANFARE [3/1999]

You have been warned. Marco Polo's disc comes with a sturdy, not to say alarming, endorsement from composer Kevin Volans: "This is not music for the faint-hearted. Listen to it as loud as you dare, and then some." Indeed, my neighbours will testify that, for substantial periods, Gerald Barry steers a forceful course betweenforte andffff, most especially in the longest work here, Chevaux-dejp premiered at the 1988 Proms. The composer seizes a military metaphor to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Armada - the title refers to a seventeenth-century anti-cavalry spike - and propels us into an almost unremitting 17 minutes of activity and alarum.

Surprisingly, given Barry's reputation for wit and ingenuity, the assorted gear-changes, rhythmic stumbles and textural fissures are less convincing than the outright brutality. This is unexpected because, as AW put it when recommending NMC's survey of the instrumental and chamber works (4/95), the distinctive thing about Barry - for all the ostensibly "rudimentary minimalist kit" - is his cultivation of "discontinuity and contradiction". In his writing for larger forces, the discontinuities can come across as contrived, the contradictions rather less arresting. Or is it simply that their execution has to be tighter than is sometimes the case in the present collection?

Flamboys is a less gory occasional piece in which the predominantly festive high jinks are prefaced by a finely shaded high bassoon and trumpet exchange. And Sur lespointes, a variant of the virtuosic piano solo of the same name on the NMC disc, offers the perfect antidote to the hyperbole of 'hard' minimalism with its equally spaced, sempre soito voce staccato chords. Admittedly, its trial-by-rhythmic unison exposes shortcomings in the National Symphony Orchestra's ensemble. But, given the demanding nature of this programme, particularly for the wind and brass, one can only sympathize with the musicians for surviving what must have been a punishing two-day recording schedule.

If in the last resort this is interesting rather than essential listening, uncommitted readers may yet be seduced by the more overt Irish dimension of Hard D.

-- Gramophone [4/1998]

MOSONYI: Opera Transcriptions

SCARMOLIN: Orchestral Works

In a career that spanned a period from the 1820s until his death in 1849, the older Johann Strauss established an unrivalled position for himself among composers and performers of dance music in Vienna.

Includes work(s) by Johann Strauss Sr.. Ensemble: Slovak Sinfonietta Zilina. Conductor: Christian Pollack.