With only a couple of exceptions, all the pieces here pre-date Mompou’s uniquely spiritual collection of meditations, Musica callada. Yet 40 years earlier his very first work to be published, Cants magics, already pointed the way to that later phase of almost monastic musical withdrawal. Tiny as they are, these owe their strangely disturbing effect, at times almost hypnotic (as in No. 5), to their repetitive elements and deliberate avoidance of development. Earlier still in Mompou’s output was the Suburbis suite, evoking (rather than depicting) features of everyday street life in his native Barcelona: noteworthy are the vein of lyrical melancholy and the faux-naif harmony. Sharp ears may spot, in the first piece of the set, a near-quotation from the Ravel Sonatine; and the influence of Milhaud, with his piled-up fourths, is obvious in the third of the attractive Songs and dances, the majority of which are based on Catalan folk-tunes, treated with sophisticated harmonies. (Of this series, 13 are for piano; one for guitar and one for organ, seldom heard, are not included here.)
Heisser quotes the composer as being insistent in his demands that every detail of his scores be meticulously observed; but going beyond the many small indications to linger to a greater or lesser extent, the pianist takes a number of affettuoso freedoms. The start of No. 6 in E flat minor (the one dedicated to Rubinstein), for example, is treated with considerable rubato, before launching out into a boisterous dance; and elsewhere Heisser’s nuances of pace, sensitive as they are, are apt to detract from the music’s overt air of simplicity. But Heisser’s interpretations, if more mannered than Larrocha’s, are always intensely musical, and when he adopts a straightforward approach, as in the winning charm of “El noi de la mar” (No. 3) and the joyous sardana that follows it, he is immensely appealing.'