The Catalonia-born Roberto Gerhard was a pupil of Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s, but it was not until the 1950s, by which time he had left Franco’s Spain and had settled in Cambridge, that he began to use his teacher’s serial technique systematically in his own music. The works he composed from that point up to his death in 1970 are some of the most vivid and seriously underrated from the second half of the 20th century, but as this collection of Gerhard’s earlier works shows, the flair for instrumental colour and for creating vivid orchestral images that gives his later music such vitality had been ever present.

The ballet Don Quixote was first performed at Covent Garden in 1950. Its five scenes, with interludes and an epilogue, are based on episodes from Cervantes’ novel, and despite occasional excursions into gnarlier harmonic territory, the score is very much in the tradition of earlier 20th-century evocations of Spain, from Ravel and Debussy as well as Manuel de Falla. Gerhard had begun working on the score in 1940, soon after arriving in the UK, and the other two works here also originated in those war years: the four movements from the ballet Alegrías (Joys) have their roots in flamenco, while Pedrelliana was derived in 1954 from a symphony that Gerhard had composed in 17 years earlier as a tribute to his first teacher Felipe Pedrell, who had also taught Albéniz and De Falla; by the time Gerhard produced his revision, though, he had already left that intense nationalism far behind. All three works inhabit a musical world that Juanjo Mena, the BBC Philharmonic’s former chief conductor, understands instinctively, and the performances are suitably deft and exuberant, making the disc a fine, if belated addition to Chandos’s invaluable Gerhard series.

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