La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etc; Editor: Wah Keung Chan; Assistant Editor: Andreanne Venne
ISSN: 1206-9973
Don’t try to pin an adjective to Gerhard: he transcends them all. The son of a Swiss-German father and an Alsatian mother, born in Spanish Catalonia, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin, organised the 1936 seminal modernist festival in Barcelona and left a couple of years later to spend the rest of his life in English exile. None of these nationalities was his, any more than his modernism was dogmatic. The ballet scores on this scintillating album are rooted in Iberian folklore but the language is distinctly, inimitably Gerhard. Nobody knew what to make of him and,…