June 3, 2014: Joshua Rosemblum, writing for Opera News, recently wrote a glowing review of Perspectives Ensemble’s new album. The album is a recording of works by Xavier Montsalvatge, based on a 2012 concert organized by the Foundation in celebration of the composer’s centenary. Conducted by Angel Gil-Ordoñez and under the artistic direction of Sato Moughalian, the Perspectives Ensemble is ensemble-in-residence at the Foundation.

See the review below:

This disc won me over in its first twenty seconds — the skittering, playfully dissonant opening passage of Xavier Montsalvatge’s Folia Daliniana for four solo winds, strings, and percussion. Montsalvatge (1912-2002), a vital and under-appreciated Spanish Catalan composer, proceeds in this bracing fourteen-minute piece to define himself as something of a Spanish Poulenc: colorful, ingratiating and exuberant, if less given to sentimentality and more willing to flirt with atonality.

Composed for the closing ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, the lush Madrigal Sobre un Tema Popular that follows is based on the lovely and familiar “El cant dels ocells” (“Song of the Birds”), a traditional Catalan Christmas carol.  Mezzo Sasha Cooke unleashes seamless, beautifully shaped tones that float alluringly on the shimmering string accompaniment of the Perspectives Ensemble, conducted with sensitivity by Angel Gil-Ordóñez. Cooke also deftly negotiates the more scintillating and challenging Cinco Invocaciones al Crucificado (1969) for mezzo, three flutes, five percussionists, harp, piano, celeste, and string bass. Using texts from the sixth, thirteenth, and fifteenth centuries for these five depictions of the Passion tale, Montsalvatge uses a modernist yet evocative and accessible language to conjure the mystery and the pain of Christ’s suffering on the Cross. Clangorous percussion and disjointed rhythmic groupings provide an arresting backdrop to the momentous, often painfully observed declamations of the opening “De passione Christi.” The second movement, “Pianto della madonna,” has a gentle lilt and pungently beautiful harmonies within a transparent texture of piano, harp, and flutes. Cooke’s sound, an appealing combination of light in weight but dark in color, is especially well suited for this intimate lamentation. Later, in the bleaker, more expansive and free-ranging “Lamentacion” of the fourth movement, Cooke appropriately adds texture to her voice on such searing lines as “now you are a blade/that pierces me with untold pain,” but she maintains suitable neo-classical restraint. The final movement, celebratory and uplifting, yet still unusual in harmony and instrumental coloring, imagines how joyous it would have been to have lived in the time of Christ. Cooke’s brightened, forward placement of her sound for this movement is an effective contrast.

The disc also includes the rhapsodic, shape-shifting Serenata a Lydia de Cadaques, composed for Jean-Pierre Rampal.  Flutist  Sato Moughalian (also the artistic director of Perspectives Ensemble), plays brilliantly, especially in the pictorial, three-minute cadenza that opens the piece. Violinist Tim Fain plunges into the Shostakovich-like beginning of Concertino 1 + 13 with bite and alacrity. The extraordinary second movement features an angular yet languorous and insidious melody that consists entirely of trilled notes, creating the sound of some otherworldly instrument.  Montsalvatge’s music has that distinctive stamp of cohesive, self-assured originality that defines composers of the first rank.  This disc, with its unusual, intriguing repertoire and outstanding performances, deserves a wide hearing.