Rahel Cunz, Christoph Keller, Collegium Novum Zürich, Peter Hirsch - Gerhard: Leo, Gemini, Libra, Concerto for 8 (2014)

One can occasionally puzzle over why some music of high quality is hardly noticed in musical life, only finding its way into the repertoire with difficulty, if at all, and this is case of the works of Roberto Gerhard.

The works recorded here were all composed during the 1960s. In them, one recognises a musical handwriting with roots in the classics of modernism; it succeeds in forming the kind of synthesis, so pronouncedly realised by Stravinsky, of methods schooled by Schönberg with concertante elements and a rhythmical and sonorous sententiousness. “Dodecaphonic, but human and even a bit divine” – as Frank Harders-Wuthenow entitled an essay dedicated to Gerhard.