With the mice born of the mountainous labours of some other conductor-composers in mind, one can pay Dorati the compliment of saying that his compositions would be interesting and worth hearing even if we did not know that he was a conductor. In fact he originally intended to be a 'composer who also conducts', and he studied composition (with Kodaly) for its own sake, not simply as a valuable discipline for a career on the rostrum. That he is a real composer, not merely a 'conductor who also composes', is obvious: in the pleasure he takes not only in solving compositional problems but in posing them to himself (devising for example, in the Cinq pieces, a strict three-voice fugue for a single-line melody instrument); in his ability to write lyrical melodies that are evidently conceived in long spans; not least in his very relationship to Kodaly—Dorati's nationality and the identity of his teacher do not take much guessing, but this music was obviously written in the 1980s by someone whose ears have remained open (though critical) since he left Kodaly's classroom nearly 60 years ago. It is precisely imagined music, too, with no wasted notes and a thoroughly idiomatic use of instruments.
All three works here were written for Heinz Holliger, and they show a shrewd understanding, both of the limits (such as they are) of his technique, and of his personality as an interpreter: his quirky humour as well as his intelligence and his eloquent concentration. The Duo concertant is conceived as a modern Hungarian Rhapsody, very much in the tradition of Kodaly and Bartok (the latter evident in the piano part, no less carefully tailored to the talents of Andras Schiff), with an elegiac and slightly oriental-sounding slow introduction leading to a longer, well-varied and well-sustained scherzo. The virtuoso fireworks are exciting, but there is, too, an expressive warmth that is most attractive. The Cinq pieces are character studies or little dramas as well as almost impossible technical hurdles for Holliger to leap over, and the serene cantabile of the second and fourth pieces (a 'love letter' and a lullaby respectively), together with the pleasing ingenuity of the central fugue and the almost visible conjuring tricks of the finale ( ''Legerdemain''), make of these, too, something more than display pieces. The Trittico is a full-scale concerto, each movement featuring a different member of the double-reed family: ''Mattinata'', a suave aria for the oboe d'amore over atmospheric, often solo string lines; a scherzo ( ''Burla'') for the normal oboe, very Bartokian in its angular energy, featuring both a roughly humorous quotation from Mozart and the genuinely funny transformation of a theme from Schoenberg's Wind Quintet into a rather low polka; and a sad, sombre elegy ( ''Nenia'') for cor anglais: not quite a satisfying finale, maybe—its resourcefully-worked thematic material (mostly scalic or stepwise) is a bit plain—but effective in its exploitation of the instrument. Dorati is not a major composer, perhaps, but I can think of quite a few of his contemporaries and juniors who have less to say and much less elegance and assurance in their way of saying it.
The performances, it almost goes without saying, are splendidly adroit; the players sound grateful for the music and fond of it. Dorati has not been as well served by the recording engineers, however: Holliger is very closely microphoned in the Cinq pieces, and his gasps for breath are rather distracting; there is also a curious knocking sound, as though his instrument were catching against a music stand. The Trittico was recorded at a public concert, and the combined uproar of creaking chairs, platform noises and a squeaky floor is at times louder than the music.'