STUART MILLSON enjoys music by Granados and Ginastera, Alfvén and Rautavaara

New from the ever-exploring divine art label comes a collection of often sultry songs by a group of 20^th-century Latin composers, beginning with a name that is, perhaps, not at all well-known: Fernando Obradors (1897-1945) a Catalan conductor who, in his relatively short life, does not seem to have strayed far from his native Barcelona.

Six of his short songs, from a large-scale collection – Canciones clásicas españolas – launch the CD, and we are at once in a world of captive hearts, “kisses as unaccountable as the number of hairs on my head”, passionate beating hearts, “rash and painful love”. This is music to mirror a landscape, a climate, a temperament, but also demonstrates the desire of a Spanish national – or nationalist? – composer to establish a lieder/songbook tradition for his country. However, without an equally passionate interpretation of the work, the stories distilled into these intriguing songs would probably not communicate quite as well. That is why we would do well to celebrate the CD’s artists, two US West Coast-based musicians: Esther Rayo, a dramatic soprano voice, accompanied by Sydney-born pianist, Peter Grunberg, who clearly holds the piano part here to be a voice in its own right. Sometimes shimmering, as if in the world of Ravel, or at other times with all the ease of a cabaret song, the piano emerges on this album as belonging to the centre of the stage.

Yet it is Esther Rayo’s voice which leads this CD of seduction – a voice known in the world of opera (Tosca and La Bohème in Italy) and sacred oratorio – an instrument able to switch between the sighs of the song, El majo celeso (“From the lovely person I’m falling for”) to the painful, fatal love of La maja dolorosa (The Sorrowful Woman) by Enrique Granados (1876-1916) – a composer fascinated by the Spain of Francisco Goya. A more modernist vitality informs the music of Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2022) and two of the South American composers who are also featured on the album, Mexico’s Consuela Velazquez (1916-2005) and Argentina’s Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) – the latter composer actually having heard the young Peter Grunberg toward the start of his career performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

The spirit of Spanish folk-poetry is again to the fore in six songs by Manuel de Falla, possibly the best-known of the composers featured here – a figure often spoken of in the same breath as Stravinsky, Ravel and Debussy, whose earthy ballet suites combine all the energy of The Rite of Spring, yet mixed with the dances and raw emotions of the rural folk of Iberia – at least, the folk who live in our and the composer’s imagination. This journey through a culture and people ends with the song from which the CD takes its name: Estrellita – Little Star – by Mexico’s Manuel Ponce (1883-1948) – in which the singer implores the light shining in the heavens to: “Come down and tell me if he loves me a little, because I cannot live without his love”.

I listened to these works and wrote this review as the snow settled in early January, the weather service announcing the movement of a “cold front across the country”. But closing one’s eyes and sinking into the warm hillsides and dusty village streets of Spain, Mexico, Argentina, it was as if music had the power to take me to another dimension. The CD, a firm recommendation.

Yet the cold front did come, musically, too, in the form of a release by Chandos Records of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Neeme Jarvi, summoning us on a sleigh ride to the cold Baltic/Nordic coastal areas of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus arcticus, written in 1972, and involving slow-moving clouds of orchestral sound, occasionally interrupted by the flight of flocks of birds – their calls, recorded, and played over the sound of the Gothenburg orchestra. The composer helpfully demarcates the score with headings such as: The Bog (Think of autumn and of Tchaikovsky) and Swans migrating. Rautavaara seems to bridge the time-span between the world of Sibelius and our own era, responding to the powerful imagery and sounds of Nature in a way which suggests the contemporary preoccupation with ecology, conservation, and an attempt – not to imitate birds – but to make them a living part of music.

Rautavaara’s drifting rhapsody and meditation, though, seems slightly out of place alongside the other two pieces presented by Chandos: the much more 19^th-century-sounding ceremonial music of Hugo Alfvén’s Festpel (Festival Play) – all trumpets and courtly pride – and a score to historic derring-do at the time of the Thirty Years War, the Suite to a theatrical production from 1932 of Gustav II Adolf. A sense of national destiny flutters like a battle-standard throughout this telling of the story of the heroism and death of Sweden’s great monarch. The Gothenburg players rise to the occasion, with fervour and brassy pride – but also with some of the clouds and laments of men facing death the next day on the battlefield, but still able to fortify themselves with a tankard and a lively folk-dance.

With orchestral colour and a definite sense of place – and with a cover picture of Northern snows, migrating swans and forests of fire trees – no lover of rich orchestral music would want to be without this excellent Chandos recording.

CD details

Estrellita, Esther Rayo and Peter Grunberg, piano, divine art, ddx 21145

Alfvén, Festpel, Suite from Gustav II Adolf; Rautavaara, Cantus Arcticus, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Neeme Jarvi. Chandos Super Audio CD: CHSA 5386