Josep Termes

This is a live recording of the recital given by Josep Colom at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid on 10 October 2018. Designed to encourage an original way of listening to music, the programme consists of a linked se- quence of single movements or pieces taken from collections. Together these form an uninterrupted whole that reveals hidden analogies between Schubert and seven other composers: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and Schoenberg. Josep Colom also revives a once common but now forgotten performing tradition: that of using improvisation to create transitions between fully composed works. His concise extempore interludes lead the listener smoothly from one composition to another, creating a kind of continuum of sound.

Hyperion’s blossoming Romantic Cello Concerto series welcomes back German virtuoso Alban Gerhardt for this sixth volume. Henry Vieuxtemps and Eugène Ysaÿe are of course best known for their blistering pyrotechnics on the violin, but each of this eminent teacher-and-pupil pairing also wrote two works—little known today, alas—for cello and orchestra, and what a revelation they are. The two Vieuxtemps Concertos contain all the elements familiar from their famous violin counterparts—long-arched melodies alongside moments of outrageous virtuoso demands. The Ysaÿe works are shorter and make ideal companions.

Ritmo, Tribute to Chick Corea was recorded live back in July 2021 at the ADDA Auditorium in Alicante (Spain) during the FIJAZZ Festival. Conceived and produced by conductor/drummer Josep Vicent, ADDA Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director, with arrangements by Argentinian Latin Grammy Award Winner pianist and composer Emilio Solla, RITMO is a celebration of Chick Corea’s music and its tremendous influence in contemporary Jazz and its fusion with Latin music.

Partly composed on cantus firmus derived from plainchant, the Missa Rex Virginum is one of two that have survived from the pen of Juan de Anchieta, composer to the Catholic Monarchs, and is a typcial representative of the new style that Josep Cabré likes to call 'late Gothic', already at the dawn of the Renaissance. Anchieta, an emblematic yet still little-known figure of Basque music, had considerable influence in his own time thanks to his close relationship with the Castilian crown.

Luciano Berio's most celebrated and influential work is his Sinfonia for 8 amplified voices and orchestra (1968), a tour de force of musical quotations and collages, literary references, and social commentary that he composed for The Swingle Singers and the New York Philharmonic on the occasion of the orchestra's 125th anniversary. This composition has received noteworthy performances by Berio, Pierre Boulez, Peter Eötvös, Riccardo Chailly, Hannu Lintu, and now Josep Pons, who leads the Synergy Vocals and the BBC Symphony Orchestra for this important release on Harmonia Mundi.

A year after the two hundredth anniversary of Gaetano Donizetti's birth (1797) and 150 years after his death (1848), the Teatro de la Maestranza de Sevilla chose to open its 1998-9 operatic season with four per­formances of Alahor in Granata, an almost for­gotten opera by the composer. This is an event al a huge historical importance since it marks the first time that the opera has been performed in the XXth century. Alahor in Granata was first performed in the Teatro Carolino in Palermo on the 7th of January 1826 but, alt­hough the opera was again staged in the same city in 1830, it later passed into oblivion and has never been performed ever since. Up until now, as was the case with many of Donizetti's works, a hundred and seventy two years after its pre­miére, we had very little news about this beauti­full masterpiece's original fate.

It's great to see the music of Nino Rota getting so much attention. He was a wonderful composer, and the ballet suite from La strada may be his orchestral masterpiece (just a quick note: the French language title identifies this as a suite from the eponymous film; it is in fact the more familiar arrangement of the later ballet). There are now four competitive recordings of this piece, the least interesting of which is on Chandos with the Teatro Massimo orchestra: not bad, but not as well played or recorded as either Muti's slightly stiff version with the excellent La Scala forces, or Atma's brilliant recent release featuring the Greater Montréal Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin. All of the couplings differ in various ways, though Muti also has the dances from Il gattopardo (The Leopard).