This is the American composer Steven R Gerber, not the Swiss, Rene Gerber. Now in his early fifties he’s fortunate to have a British record company and this looks like his first full CD. He studied with Milton Babbitt at Princeton but escaped the bear-hug of serialism by going tonal in the early 1980s. Gerber has many Russian connections and these show through in his music, although the composer says he can’t altogether explain this resemblance.
In many ways the earliest piece here, the 1989 Symphony, is the most impressive. The first movement opens with a superb long string melody. Expectations are high but after that things come to a halt with a kind of Stravinskian chorale at 5'42''. The greatest Russian also throws a shadow over some of the repetitive textures in the quicker sections of the first two movements. But the Symphony is coherent and its economical gestures are convincing.
Dirge and Awakening, the next piece chronologically, opens with a four-note motif which recurrs impressively at 9'41'' with some rather obvious fanfares in between. The Viola Concerto was written for Yuri Bashmet and honours him by deriving the notes of the second movement’s melody from the letters of his name. It is compact in layout and makes an effective display for the soloist.
The Triple Overture was written for the splendid Bekova Sisters specially for this CD. It opens in epic style, but the piano trio sound is rather similar to parts of the orchestra so that differentiation is hard to achieve. The return of the main motif softly at the end is impressive.
These are committed performances decently recorded.'