MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


 REVIEW

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

alternatively
CD: AmazonUK AmazonUS
Download: Classicsonline


Tomás BRETÓN (1850-1923)
Piano Trio in E major (1887) [34:42]
Cuatro piezas españolas (1913) [18:44]
LOM Piano Trio (Joan Orpella (violin); José Mor (cello); Daniel Ligorio (piano)) .
rec. Auditorium Paper de Música, Capellades, Barcelona, November 2006 (Cuatro piezas) and April 2007 (Trio).
NAXOS 8.570713 [53:26]
Experience Classicsonline

Tomás Bretón y Hernández was born in Salamanca, the son of a struggling baker, who died when Tomás was only two. Despite the family’s difficult circumstances, Tomás was able to enrol as a student - aged 8 - at the Escuela de Nobles y Bellas Artes in Salamanca. His natural musical gifts, and sheer hard work, meant that by the age of ten he was able to make a contribution to the family finances by working as a violinist. When he, his older brother and his mother moved to Madrid he continued to work in theatres and restaurants to pay for his studies (in violin and composition) at the Madrid Conservatory. An outstanding student - he graduated with the highest honours in 1872 - he was able to study in both Roma and Vienna and began to make his way as a composer of zarzuela and opera. In the ten or eleven years after 1875 he wrote some ten works for the theatre, including La Dolores (in its 1892 version a one-act zarzuela, revised as a full-fledged opera three years later) and, most famously, La verbena de la Paloma (1894), one of the most enduringly attractive works in the zarzuela tradition. Such lasting reputation as Breton has acquired has derived from his theatrical works.

But he made other significant contributions to the renewal of Spanish music. As director of, in turn, the Unión Artistico-Musical and the Sociedad de Conciertos, he did much to promote performances of new works by Spanish composers and to introduce significant foreign works to Spain. From 1901 he was Professor of Composition at the Madrid Conservatory where, only two years later he became Principal and was a figure of real importance in the development of Spanish music in the early years of the twentieth century (well discussed in Victor Sánchez, Tomás Bretón. Un músico de la Restauración, Madrid: 2002).

There are, then, good historical reasons for paying attention to Bretón’s music. But - happily - there are also more exciting reasons for doing so. Quite a lot of it is rather good and still seriously neglected. While his zarzuelas have not gone unnoticed or unadmired, his works in other forms is too little known. These include three symphonies, a series of symphonic poems, songs - and chamber works. (His String Quartet in D major (c.1910) is particularly fine, a personal and ‘Spanish’ development of the Viennese tradition).

On the present well-recorded CD we are offered two compositions for piano trio. The earlier of the two is also the more substantial. Written in 1887 (and first published in London a few years later) the Piano Trio owes much to French examples - perhaps particularly that of Saint-Saëns - in its rich harmonic language (though Brahms is in the mixture too), but it also subtly signals its Spanish origins in places, noticeably in the lyrical andante, where Spanish inflections play an important role in creating an air of elegant melancholy. The third movement (allegro molto) is full of sparkling rhythms and the use of pizzicato strings makes for some striking effects. In the final allegro the rhythmic accents are again strongly pronounced and the writing demonstrates a sensitive ear for changes of timbre and texture. While it would be wrong to claim that this is a neglected masterpiece, it certainly rewards attentive listening - at least as fully as do more than a few better-known works.

The Cuatro piezas españolas carry the titles ‘Danza Oriental’, ‘Scherzo Andaluz’, ‘Bolero’ and ‘Polo Gitano’. The first is both graceful and dignified, its dancing rhythms dignified in their well-shaped phrases; the ‘Scherzo Andaluz’ is initially full of energy, the interplay of the instruments well-judged and the imitative patterns interesting, with some more reflective passages attractively setting off the surrounding vitality. The ‘Bolero’ has an elegant charm which is entirely decorous and polite, while ‘Polo Gitano’ is a similarly decorous evocation of earthier folk idioms. All four pieces offer, within the idiom of a kind of superior salon music, a more obviously nationalistic Bretón than we hear in the Piano Trio. Whether the slighter music of the Cuatro piezas españolas or the more ambitious writing of the Trio is preferred may be no more than a subjective choice (or a product of the passing mood). Both have their attractions and both show what an interesting figure Bretón was.

Glyn Pursglove

see also reviews by Gary Higginson and Jonathan Woolf

 


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index