Antonio José
Martinez Palacios was known as Antonio
José in the musical world. Until
recently his music has made little headway
outside Spain and little inside. He
was born in Burgos outside the ambit
of the major cultural centres such as
Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona. He felt
the magnetic pull of French voices.
Unlike the Basque Isasi his sympathies
were with de Falla and Paris rather
than with Berlin and Vienna. Ravel and
Debussy are luxurious voices within
his four movement Sinfonia castellana
and so is nationalism through Castilian
folk music. The symphony is evocative,
mysterious, and diaphanous yet not as
dense or libidinously sensuous as Szymanowski
or Griffes. There is another voice there
too; Rachmaninov, especially in the
third movement. The folk strata are
to the fore in the pipe, tabor and saint
day processional splendour of the Danza
burgalesa: a touch of Respighi - a dab
of Canteloube. The orchestra are enthusiastic
and aim high however I can imagine a
more precise and polished version.
Jose worked for may
years on El mozo de mulas - his
major operatic project based on chapter
43, Part I, Don Quixote. Tragically
the opera remained unorchestrated when
he was killed as a combatant in the
Spanish Civil War. This work was completed
in 1992 by Alejandro Yagüe. The
prelude and popular dance were complete
and in full score in 1934. The prelude
is a languid aubade. The popular dance
is a rather exuberant undomesticated
effort sounding somewhat like de Falla
but with touches of Sibelius and even
Poulenc.
The Evocaciones
are presented here in a single track.
The suite was first presented in Bilbao
conducted by Vladimir Golschmann. Again
the orchestration is lapidary with certain
gorgeous overtones which might in another
context remind us of Ippolitov-Ivanov’s
Caucasian Sketches and Borodin’s
In the Steppes of Central Asia.
Here is a joyous cortege heard at first
distantly then closing with the listener
and finally receding into a misty distance.
The March of the
Lead Soldiers was orchestrated by
Alejandro Yagüe in 1988. The notes
suggest that it is meant to be satirical
and true enough there is the occasional
wink from the composer however he cannot
resist the poetic subtleties. The outer
movements of the Suite Ingenua have
the vernal innocence of Bax’s Springtime
in Sussex but with an Iberian accent
and a touch more neo-classicism than
we find in the rest of the disc.
It’s rather a pity
that this music was never discovered
by Eugene Goossens or Leopold Stokowski.
If it had it might have stood some chance
of travelling. At least we can now hear
it in sympathetic interpretations and
come to our own conclusions.
If you are up for engaging
nationalist flavoured music with impressionist
leanings and sympathies paralleling
those of Frederico de Freitas, Canteloube,
de Falla and Ravel then look no further.
Rob Barnett
Alberto Rosado (piano) 
