Jacques Martin

An almost exact contemporary of Mozart and similarly admired by Haydn, Germanborn Joseph Martin Kraus spent most of his short career in Stockholm at the court of Gustav III. Since the court’s musical taste inclined towards the theatre, Kraus had little opportunity to concentrate on chamber works, but he did produce several string quartets as well as these surviving sonatas for violin and keyboard.

Though the saxophone has never found a regular place in the orchestra it has nevertheless captured the interest of a long line of composers; a square peg doesn't need to fit into any orchestral round hole when it is centre-stage. It is, too, one of the instruments whose technique has been advanced by players of jazz—a field in which John Harle remains active. There are now exponents of awesome ability, worthy of the attention of serious composers such as, in this recording, Bennett—who is also given to crossing the musical tracks.

La Dame de mes Songes, Dulcinea, as sung by Alexandre Arnoux and Jacques Ibert in the third of the four Songs of Don Quixote (1932), is La Dame de mes songes. It could also be Spain, as dreamed of, at least occasionally from the 1830s to the 1930s, by most French composers who usually reduced it to Andalusia and what they believed to be flamenco. If they stop over in Andalusia, the performers of this disc also travel to Old Castile, Extremadura and Murcia with the help of composers such as Henri Collet, Federico García Lorca, Emiliana de Zubeldía or Raoul Laparra and Jacques Ibert.