The Catalonia-born Roberto Gerhard was a pupil of Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s, but it was not until the 1950s that he began to use his teacher’s serial technique systematically in his own music. But, as this collection of Gerhard’s earlier works shows, the flair for instrumental colour and for creating vivid orchestral images that gives his later music such vitality had been ever present.
The ballet Don Quixote was first performed at Covent Garden in 1950, but Gerhard had begun working on the score in 1940, soon after leaving Franco’s Spain for the UK. The other two works here, the ballet Alegrías (Joys) and Pedrelliana, also originated in those war years. All three inhabit a musical world that Juanjo Mena, the BBC Philharmonic’s former chief conductor, understands instinctively. His performances are suitably deft and exuberant, making the disc a fine, if belated, addition to Chandos’s invaluable Gerhard series.
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