Don Quixote

The Catalan Roberto Gerhard studied piano with Granados, and was the only Spanish composer to study with Arnold Schoenberg. It was, however, over twenty years before he committed himself to writing twelve-tone music. In the interim, his output brought a new focus and precision (owing more to Stravinsky and Bartók) to the Spanish style. All the works on this album were composed in that period. Dating from the early 1940s, his ballet Alegrías was originally conceived for two pianos, but soon evolved into the four-movement suite heard here.

The Catalan Roberto Gerhard studied piano with Granados, and was the only Spanish composer to study with Arnold Schoenberg. It was, however, over twenty years before he committed himself to writing twelve-tone music. In the interim, his output brought a new focus and precision (owing more to Stravinsky and Bartók) to the Spanish style. All the works on this album were composed in that period. Dating from the early 1940s, his ballet Alegrías was originally conceived for two pianos, but soon evolved into the four-movement suite heard here.

During his long and exceptionally fruitful creative life, Richard Strauss (18641949) composed only a few works for the cello. Only three have survived and small as that number may seem, those cello works are critical to the composers development. Daniel Müller-Schott sees the early Sonata for cello and piano op. 6 and the late tone poem Don Quixote op. 35 as marking the path that was to lead Strauss within the space of a few years from Romanticism to the Modern era in music. The cellist highlights this watershed in Strausss artistic development with his own transcriptions, expressly made for this CD, of the Lieder Zueignung op. 10/1 and Ich trage meine Minne op. 32/1.

After two recordings devoted to Mahler’s Third and Fifth symphonies, François-Xavier Roth continues his exploration of the major works premiered by the Gürzenich Orchestra. In the spotlight this time are two of the young Richard Strauss’s most brilliant achievements: Till Eulenspiegel and Don Quixote. In the latter, a symphonic poem in the guise of a double concerto, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Tabea Zimmermann form a picaresque duo playing the Knight of the Doleful Countenance and his squire Sancho Panza. © harmonia mundi