Roberto Gerhard attached New York to the title of his Fourth Symphony (1967) because it was commissioned for performance there. Thirty years on, the music's frequent recourse to imposing brass clusters suggests common ground with Varese's Deserts (1954), and its subtext of urban menace and decay. Varese would probably have scorned the way Gerhard introduces allusions to Catalan folk music as a way of humanising his bleak landscape, and the two kinds of material do indeed seem distinctly uneasy associates. But that might have been Gerhard's point; not to integrate atonal symphonism and nostalgic folklorism, but to let them stand side by side as symbols of a fractured culture and an uprooted life.
Matthias Bamert and the BBCSO provoke such thoughts through the cogency and clarity with which they project the symphony's constant shifts of mood: and the sound has rather greater range and presence than that of Victor Pablo Perez's well-conceived reading for Auvidis Montaigne. The Chandos coupling, the suite from the ballet Pandora, was written a quarter of a century before the symphony, and here folklorism is at the heart of music which has nothing to do with mere exoticism.
This wartime score is as redolent of deep, dark feelings as anything Gerhard ever wrote: and in one of those extraordinary musical coincidences, he hits on a mock march theme close to that in Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, written a short while before, which Gerhard is most unlikely to have heard. Good though the Auvidis Montaigne version of Pandora is, this one is better recorded, and lingers even more potently in the mind's ear.'