This is the second in Chandos’ three-volume series of Juanjo Mena’s idiomatic exploration of Ginastera’s orchestra works with the BBC Philharmonic. The series was started to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the greatest of all Argentinean composers, Volume 1 receiving uniformly high praise.

This album features a late work, lesser-known, yet rich in surprises, namely the Second Piano Concerto. Here the keen musicality and sweeping virtuosity of Xiayin Wang meet the sumptuous sound of the BBC orchestra. It succeeds her recording of concertos by Tchaikovsky and Khachaturian with the RSNO [CHAN 5167], which was made Editor’s Choice by Gramophone.

It is coupled with the exotic early ballet Panambí, heard complete with a concluding contribution from the Manchester Chamber Choir.

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Chandos Records’ Spanish Music series (La Música de España) with the BBC Philharmonic and its Chief Conductor Juanjo Mena, a specialist in the repertoire, now reaches the music of Isaac Albéniz, one of the greatest Spanish composers of any era.

Highly colourful and subtly contrasted, the Suite española is perhaps the most interesting early anticipation of the great piano collection Iberia, composed about twenty years later, in which, as Debussy remarked, Albéniz ‘put the best of himself’. Brilliantly successful though he was as a pianist and composer of piano music, Albéniz also composed operas, having his first success with The Magic Opal, in London, three orchestral movements from which feature here.

The soloist in the Concierto fantástico is the British pianist Martin Roscoe, already highly praised for his many past recordings for Chandos, on which he features with artists such as Tasmin Little and Jennifer Pike.

Written at the same time as the Piano Concerto yet very different in style, Rapsodia española positively celebrates the Spanish idiom – all the more vividly in the orchestration by George Enescu, chosen for this recording. The piano soloist, again, is Martin Roscoe.

“The BBC Philharmonic under Juanjo Mena, finely recorded, play with a suitably heated, open-hearted commitment”.
“Martin Roscoe’s performances are of exceptional skill and affection”.
(Bryce Morrison, Gramophone Magazine)

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Impressive in Chandos’s ongoing, very successful Spanish music series, the BBC Philharmonic and its chief conductor, Juanjo Mena, also explores the works of the Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera in three orchestral volumes. Not only acknowledged as a leading South-American composer of his day, Ginastera is also seen as one of the heroes of Latin-American music in general, whose enduring source of inspiration was Argentina itself: its pre-Columbian legacy on the one hand and the vast landscapes of the pampas on the other.

Indeed, if Ollantay is inspired by the former, and more especially by a dramatic poem of Inca origin, Ginastera turned to the latter for the setting of his second ballet, Estancia, based on the life of the gauchos who work in those wide open spaces. The essential genre of music in this piece is the malambo, an exclusively masculine, competitive traditional dance, far from the seductive tangos of Ginastera’s now more famous compatriot and pupil Astor Piazzolla. While the landscape is the same in Pampeana No. 3, the music is more abstract and contrasted, marking the transition from what the composer called a compositional period of ‘objective nationalism’ to a ‘subjective one’.