Zastun - Hilda
Paredes Guitar Concerto No 2 - Jorge Ritter
6 songs from L'infantament meravellos de Shaharazada - Gerhard, arr. Meirion Bowen
Last Tuesday night's concert, the second in the "Explorer" series of contemporary music, was quite an occasion, as all the works were receiving their first performances and the two Mexican composers were present to introduce theirs. Meirion Bowen was also present to introduce his arrangement of "The wonderful birth of Sheherazade", which Gerhard originally wrote for voice and piano.
Zaztun (the name of a magical stone used by healers in the Mayan culture) was introduced as an "abstract" work, but I think it would be more helpful to describe it as atmospheric. One could have been on a shore at night, listening to sounds rising up through banks of fog, now strident, now muffled, and beneath them all the murmur of the sea.
Ritter's Guitar Concerto No. 2 was a more familiar scene; colourful orchestration and South American rhythms made for easy listening, but Anguiano's guitar playing lacked pungency and at times was hard to hear.
The Catalan composer Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) was a pupil of the composer and folksong collector Pedrell, and also of Schoenberg, and their influence can be detected in many of his works, but Shaharazade, his first published work, is full of echoes of Strauss, Mahler, Debussy and Ravel, as Meirion Bowen pointed out. His orchestral arrangement of six of the 12 songs fully reflected the sensuality of the Catalan poems. The cycle was a splendid vehicle for the voice of Lynda Lee, who sang with dramatic passion, ably seconded by the NSO under the guidance of Charles Hazlewood.