Roberto Gerhard, a brilliant intellect and vivid personality (with whom I was proud to be associated on more than one major project), was without question the most important Spanish composer since Falla. Or rather, Catalan, for he wore his heredity proudly: I can divulge that when he first settled in England and earned part of his living by writing arrangements for the BBC he adopted the pen-name Juan Serralonga, a historic Catalan folk-hero; and he had the endearing habit of often incorporating Catalan folk-tunes in the dodecaphonic texture of his music. The second of his dreamily poetic, epigrammatic Apunts, for example, written in 1922 just before he became a pupil of Schoenberg, includes El cotillo, a favourite of his which was to reappear several times in later works, including the Fourth Symphony; the more tonal and wholly delightful Soirees de Barcelona (commissioned as a ballet score by the de Basil company, but never completed because of the Spanish Civil War and, on the outbreak of the Second World War, the dissolution of the company) was, Gerhard stated, “deliberately Catalan” and incorporates no fewer than six native folk-songs. Jordi Maso’s nimble, beautifully lucid and sensitively nuanced playing ensures that, despite its orchestral origin, the suite emerges extremely successfully for the piano.
He also achieves a considerable range of colour in the suite of highlights Gerhard arranged from his Don Quixote ballet (which is available in its orchestral form on an Auvidis CD, 10/92). The only other work here, the Three Impromptus (a wedding present for Lord Harewood in 1950), begins with a fandanguillo which integrates into its 12-note texture the Garcia polo familiar from Falla’s Seven Spanish folk-songs, mitigating the “dehumanizing tendencies of a purely intellectual approach to composition”.
Strict dodecaphony, however, is employed by Gerhard’s distinguished pupil Joaquin Homs in his mercurial Second Sonata, whose initially reflective slow movement is surprisingly euphonious. A word of praise, incidentally, for the very authoritative and informative booklet-note.'