In 1973, three years after Roberto Gerhard’s death, the London Sinfonietta mounted a remarkable series of concerts in which all his music for chamber forces or for small ensembles was played, together with Schoenberg’s complete output for the same media. Coupling the two, pupil and master, made a provocative statement – “yes, we should be taking the hitherto comparatively neglected, ‘marginal’ Gerhard that seriously” – and also enabled audiences to trace Schoenberg’s influence on Gerhard and what he made of it. Among the works that most fascinatingly demonstrated both debt and independence were the five single-movement chamber pieces that Gerhard wrote in the last decade of his life, four of which are collected here. All of them, especially Leo, his last completed work, are obviously Schoenbergian ‘chamber symphonies’, though with as much of a relationship to late as to early Schoenberg. But Leo ends with a folk- (or folk-like) song: its haunting, moving coda is to all intents and purposes identical to that of Libra, a work that is Spanish through and through. Personal reasons can easily be adduced for this: Libra was Gerhard’s own star-sign, Leo his Austrian wife’s; the two pieces are perhaps portraits. But that coda is not the only element of Libra’s Spanishness that is echoed in Leo, and maybe an obvious guitar figuration or a melodic line of cante jondo guttural harshness are not Gerhard’s only ways of expressing Spanishness. To look at all of Spain’s heritage, not just her picturesque folklore, had been a central doctrine of his other teacher, Felipe Pedrell.
In all these works, in fact, alongside his continuing fascination with modernism, Gerhard seems also concerned to include all of those other aspects of his musical self that were not Schoenbergian. His Spanishness, of course (all three Impromptus are based on Spanish melodies) but also, in the exhilarating Concert for 8, his humour and enjoyment of disguises and role-playing; in Gemini his vivid dramatization of a conflict between elements drawn from the very nature of the instruments themselves.
As at that festival 24 years ago, these vivid performances seem to dare the listener into comparing Gerhard’s mastery with that of his teacher, and to finding the pupil a master also. Of all the composers given hospitality as refugees but an otherwise rather chilly welcome to Britain as Fascism drove them across the Channel (Berthold Goldschmidt, Egon Wellesz, Hans Gal) Gerhard seems more and more the most distinguished, and yet numerous of his major works are not available on CD. This collection, as finely recorded as it is brilliantly played, fills part of that gap quite admirably: not one of these pieces is minor, each of them is by a major composer at the height of his powers.'