亞瑞格: 交響曲/清唱劇 璜侯．梅納 指揮 BBC愛樂管弦樂團 Juanjo Mena / Arriaga: Symphony & Herminie

亞瑞格: 交響曲/清唱劇/(幸福的奴隸)序曲
貝莉特．諾巴肯．索爾塞特 女高音
璜侯．梅納 指揮 BBC愛樂管弦樂團

The Spanish music specialist and former Chief Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, Juanjo Mena, continues the series 'La Música de España', which has seen the recording of orchestral works by de Falla, Turina, and Albeniz, with another important Spanish composer: Juan Crisostomo de Arriaga, known for years after his early death as the 'Spanish Mozart'.

The orchestral overture to Los esclavos felices (The Happy Slaves) is all that survives of an opera which the child prodigy Arriaga wrote aged fourteen. When Arriaga moved to Paris in 1821 to study under Fetis, Guerin, and Baillot, he revised the overture, making changes to the instrumentation and removing a third theme. It is the revised version which is heard on this recording.

Air de l'Opera Medee and Herminie are included in the largely autograph volume 'Ensayos lírico-dramáticos' (Lyric-dramatic Essays), and here feature one of Scandinavia's most sought-after concert singers, the soprano Berit Norbakken Solset. Tonally ambiguous, the D minor Symphonie à grand orchestre, which begins and ends in D major, and the Overture, Op. 20, in D major, which was written 'without having learnt the principles of harmony', are proof that the death of Arriaga at age nineteen was a 'sad loss to Basque music'.