Roberto Gerhard: new recording of complete Don Quixote
Chandos has added a new disc to its collection of Roberto Gerhard recordings with Juanjo Mena conducting the BBC Philharmonic in the complete Don Quixote ballet, together with the flamenco-inspired Alegrías Suite and Pedrelliana.
An all-Roberto Gehard release from Chandos has been attracting glowing reviews for its vivid and idiomatic performances by the BBC Philharmonic under Juanjo Mena. The label already has a series of Gerhard recordings conducted by Matthias Bamert, and the new disc adds one of the composer’s greatest scores to the collection, his ballet Don Quixote in its complete form. Though the Dances from Don Quixote suite is regularly heard, this is only the second complete recording of this major 20th century work, following the version by Victor Pablo Pérez on Auvidis dating from 1992.
Limelight Magazine selected the new Gerhard disc as its Recording of the Month in November, with a review accompanied by Juanjo Mena interviewed by Clive Paget. The conductor noted how he first discovered the composer’s music during his student years and has looked for opportunities to return to it: “Every time I have conducted Gerhard’s music, I think it has been an eye-opener for both the orchestras and the audiences alike. The musicians play it with great intensity and a good attitude, because they recognise that the music is very good.”
> Read Limelight’s interview with Juanjo Mena
The disc was also selected as Norman Lebrecht’s album of the week in The Critic, noting on Don Quixote that “the score is dazzling, dramatic and athletic, all you could want from a ballet, and aurally intriguing, besides.”
“…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 performances are suitably deft and exuberant, making the disc a fine, if belated addition to Chandos’s invaluable Gerhard series… The ballet Don Quixote was first performed at Covent Garden in 1950. Its five scenes, with interludes and an epilogue, are based on episodes from Cervantes’ novel, and despite occasional excursions into gnarlier harmonic territory, the score is very much in the tradition of earlier 20th-century evocations of Spain, from Ravel and Debussy as well as Manuel de Falla.”
The Guardian
“…a 37-minute tapestry of 15 short cues, skilfully woven together with thematic links and so vividly characterised that the major characters of in Cervantes’s novel – the deluded knight, his servant Sancho Panza, his imaginary mistress Dulcinea, even his horse – easily come to life, dancing before our eyes and ears.”
BBC Music Magazine
“Gerhard can be wonderfully imaginative in his visual evocations, as in the way he illustrates the spinning windmills with slow-turning figures in the piccolo and horn… Juanjo Mena and the BBC Philharmonic play all three works with feeling and flair… and Chandos’s engineering is both clear and atmospheric.”
Gramophone
“A great, under-represented 20th-century ballet score, stunningly recorded.”
Limelight
“This album puts the spotlight back on Roberto Gerhard, whose music is all too rare in the concert hall… The Don Quixote score is as colourful as one could wish, with a rich orchestration including two pianos. The main characters or elements are associated with various instruments (bass clarinet for Don Quixote, English horn or flutes for Dulcinea, percussion and flute for Sancho Panza, piccolo and horn for the moving arms of the mill, etc.). Fanfares, a variety of dances, ironic or humorous interludes, a lullaby or paso doble are all on the menu of this imaginative score, which we would love to see on stage.”
Crescendo
> Further information on Work: Don Quixote (complete ballet)
