It was Rostropovich's idea to invite 12 composers to contribute to a seventieth birthday gift for the uminent Swiss conductor Paul Sacher in 1976. Given Sacher's enlightened sponsorship of contemporary music over the previous 40 years there was no shortage of talent, and even if the compositions as a group are not exactly light-hearted, they represent an imposing array of individual voices, amounting almost to a survey of the state of music in the mid 1970s.
All the composers were asked to make use of the six musical letters of Sacher's surname - E flat, A, C, B, E and D – and a couple of them find ways of translating 'Paul' as well. The results are nothing if not diverse. Most poignant, by far, is the brief, plangent incantation composed by Benjamin Britten in the last year of his life. The most senior composer by date of birth, Conrad Beck (1901-89) provided a rather dry set of miniatures, but another senior figure, Wolfgang Fortner (1907-87) showed how an austere serial style could acquire elements of warmth and flexibility within a restricted time-frame.
The first disc is launched in impressive fashion with Ginastera's Punena No. 2: the title refers to the vast, barren plateau of the Andes and to the fear that can arise in such awesome surroundings. Ginastera matches these images with a series of bold, eloquent gestures, evidently relishing – as did most of his fellow-contributors – the challenge of the medium and the honour of the occasion. I was less taken with two of the longest compositions – Klaus Huber's rather featureless Transpositio ad infinitum and Christobal Halffter's Variations which, in this company, lack that crucial spark of personal style and sense of purpose. On the other hand Lutoslawski, Dutilleux, Henze and Berio all turn in imaginative, memorable miniatures of genuine substance. The Berio is particularly appealing (a determined attempt to escape from the avant-garde pretensions of his Sequenza cycle?) and the ending of Lutoslawski's Variations brings a welcome – and all too rare – touch of humour to the proceedings.
Humour was certainly not on Heinz Holliger's mind when he devised the craggy but undeniably imposing soundscape of his Chaconne. The work which ends – and crowns – the collection is not, as it happens, excessively severe, but Boulez's Messagesquisse remains an intense (if also unusually explicit) demonstration of his favoured techniques of textural proliferation, demanding another six cellos to support the soloist. This performance, with its wide dynamic range, is more forceful than the music ideally demands. It is nevertheless technically immaculate. The playing of Patrick and Thomas Demenga throughout this set is spectacularly assured and, when the music permits, refined: no regrets, then, that Rostropovich himself was not involved, and no complaints about the recordings either. R1 '9508070'