Gerhard: Don Quixote (Complete Ballet); Suite from Alegrias; Pedrelliana (Chandos)
★★★★☆
Don’t try to pin an adjective to Gerhard: he transcends them all. The son of a Swiss-German father and an Alsatian mother, born in Spanish Catalonia, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin, organised the 1936 seminal modernist festival in Barcelona, and left a couple of years later to spend the rest of his life in English exile.
None of these nationalities was his, any more than his modernism was dogmatic. The ballet scores on this scintillating album are rooted in Iberian folklore, but the language is distinctly, inimitably Gerhard. Nobody knew what to make of him and, while Boosey & Hawkes published his scores and the BBC have them an occasional play, Gerhard remained to his death in 1970 an immutable outsider.
Don Quixote, which he revised obsessively, might be accounted his greatest lifetime success. Choreographed at Covent Garden in 1950, it was danced by Robert Helpmann and Margot Fonteyn to great international attention. But, the Petipa-Minkus version of the Don was too well embedded in ballet minds, and Gerhard failed to displace it by so much as half an inch. The score is dazzling, dramatic and athletic, all you could want from a ballet, and aurally intriguing, besides. Keyboard and woodwinds work overtime to create an ambience that is notionally Spanish, but not. Whatever, it’s perfect summer listening.
I am even more enthralled by Pedrelliana, a setting of folkish themes by Gerhard’s first teacher, Felipe Pedrell. The music veers from bullfight to something close to Luis Bunuel films, with lashings of Hollywood cowboy imitations. For sheer eclecticism, this is the real thing. Gerhard the sort-of modernist could really entertain. His score is brilliantly played by the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, conducted by Juanjo Mena.
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