Fans of Barber will want this CD, recorded in New Zealand in 1989, for the first recording of Fadograph of a Yestern Scene. It's not claimed as such, but this short piece from 1971 seems to have been neglected. Frankly, the most original thing about it is the title (from Joyce's Finnegans Wake: near the opening), since the orchestral atmosphere leans on Debussy's La mer. Barber's entry in the new American Grove refers to the premiere of Fadograph as a work for two solo voices and orchestra. It's already an attractive impression for orchestra, but with voices taking the arch-shaped rising and falling phrases (another Barber piece with a Joyce text) it must have been rapturous. A further demonstration of what Barber asserted late in life: ''There's no reason music should be difficult for the audience to understand is there?''
The ballet suite Medea was written for Martha Graham who gave it the title Cave of the Heart. The story—Medea murders her own children—deals with jealously, violence and revenge. I have never felt that this was quite Barber's subject. The ''Kantikos Agonias'' (track 7) is marked ''menacing, with foreboding'' but doesn't have these qualities. At least not in this performance. The recording, too, doesn't provide the dynamic range that Barber's sombre but varied colours call for. All the same, this brings the work back into the British catalogue and Medea's dance (track 6) is vintage Barber with dark colours harp and piano unusually doubled—and an agitato which kicks off from a kind of piano boogie.
Barber's Essays are becoming classics, with several recordings of each. The literary title suited him and the Third Essay (1978), written only three years before his death, is as inventive as the others. The performance is vivid too, completing a CD which, at 46 minutes only, would have had time for something else.'