Robert Trevino's first album together the Basque National Orchestra featuring orchestral works by the great French-Basque composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) received an excellent response. The program in this second volume is perhaps more 'French' in nature, but the Basque orchestra is giving dazzling performances of these works by their own national composer. While the first album was focused on some of Ravel's most popular orchestral works, this album includes some rarities, including Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) in it's complete ballet version, as well as one world première recording: Pierre Boulez's orchestration of Ravel's World War I era piano work, Frontispice.

Robert Trevino's first album together the Basque National Orchestra featuring orchestral works by the great French-Basque composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) received an excellent response. The program in this second volume is perhaps more 'French' in nature, but the Basque orchestra is giving dazzling performances of these works by their own national composer. While the first album was focused on some of Ravel's most popular orchestral works, this album includes some rarities, including Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) in it's complete ballet version, as well as one world premiere recording: Pierre Boulez's orchestration of Ravel's World War I era piano work, Frontispice.

Contemporary composer Fernando Velázquez presents Viento, together with the Basque National Orchestra, the choir Kup Taldea and international star cellist Johannes Moser. After multiple international successes as a film composer, Viento shows Velázquez’s skill in genres such as the symphonic poem, cantata and cello concerto. The album opens with his cello concerto, which combines an elegiac, Stabat Mater-like opening movement with a heroic, rock-inspired middle movement and a finale that employs the Basque Zortziko dance rhythm. Moser’s masterly interpretation brings out all the colours and episodes of this exceptional score.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s religious nature, specifically Russian Orthodox, finds expression in each of these pieces. Each also makes use of her much-loved bayan, the Russian button accordion played here with great virtuosity by Iñaki Alberdi. Kadenza is a solo tour de force; Et exspecto, based on the closing words of the Creed (‘I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’) is an impressive five-movement sonata in which, the booklet-note tells us, the performer’s interpretation goes, with her encouragement, well beyond the composer’s notation. In the other works, much is made of the combination of the accordion sounds and Asier Polo’s cello. With In croce, a number of cross-like ideas derive from the title – crossing of registers, crossing of lines and textures and so on – which are essentially private creative stimuli for the composer. But in the major work on the record, the half-hour Seven Words, the sentences spoken by Jesus on the cross are graphically, even fervently implied. Gubaidulina’s love of short motifs, here often using very close intervals, produces in her hands music of strong and even painful intensity, seizing and gripping the attention, sometimes with fiercely punched chords on the accordion or with soaring harmonics on the cello that vanish into silence after the final Word. The longest movement is the central No 4, Jesus’s cry, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’, a powerful and deeply affecting invention. This is a remarkable, compelling work.

All four American composers on this new album by the Basque National Orchestra and conductor Robert Trevino wrote music that was known, played and esteemed during their lifetimes, but none of them ever had a huge 'hit': the pieces here are likely familiar only to musical scholars. Yet while it is uncommon enough to find Charles Martin Loeffler, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles and Howard Hanson sharing the same album, the conductor Robert Trevino has taken his exploration still further, into the recesses of their repertory – complete with a Hanson piece, Before the Dawn, that has had to wait a century for this, its premiere recording. Robert Trevino’s debut album with the Basque National Orchestra on Ondine featured orchestral works by Maurice Ravel and has received excellent reviews in music media around the world.

All four American composers on this new album by the Basque National Orchestra and conductor Robert Trevino wrote music that was known, played and esteemed during their lifetimes, but none of them ever had a huge 'hit': the pieces here are likely familiar only to musical scholars. Yet while it is uncommon enough to find Charles Martin Loeffler, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles and Howard Hanson sharing the same album, the conductor Robert Trevino has taken his exploration still further, into the recesses of their repertory – complete with a Hanson piece, Before the Dawn, that has had to wait a century for this, its premiere recording. Robert Trevino’s debut album with the Basque National Orchestra on Ondine featured orchestral works by Maurice Ravel and has received excellent reviews in music media around the world.

Following his extremely successful Beethoven symphony cycle for Ondine, Robert Trevino's second release on Ondine is also his first alongside the Basque National Orchestra. Trevino has been Music Director of the Basque National Orchestra since 2017 and, appropriately enough, their first recording together is a survey of the most celebrated Basque composer, Maurice Ravel - and is rooted in a very Basque view of his music.