RUDOLF ESCHER (1912-1980): Orchestral Music: Concerto for String Orchestra, Musique pour L’Esprit en Deuil (Concertgebouw Orchestra; Riccardo Chailly), Chamber Music: Le Tombeau de Ravel for Flute, Oboe, Viola, Cello and Harpsichord, String Trio, Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano (various artists), Choral Music: Songs of Love and Eternity, I taste a liquor never brewed, Le vrai visage de paix, Ciel, air et vents, 3 Poems by W.H. Auden (Netherlands Chamber Choir; Ed Spanjaard).

Description: Premiered by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1947, Musique pour l'esprit en deuil (1941–3) is a 20-minute score of intense, brooding pathos, inevitably overwhelmed by the shadow of conflict and a worthy counterpart to contemporary works such as Honegger’s Liturgique symphony. It is paired here with the Concerto for String Orchestra (1947-48), which attracted the admiration of John Cage, perhaps more for its surprising points of serenity than its Bartokian passages of tension and exhilarated release. The disc of chamber music opens with Le Tombeau de Ravel, composed in 1952 after Escher’s visit to the French composer’s house, and laid out as a sequence of oblique Baroque dances in homage to Ravel’s own Le Tombeau de Couperin. The two trios that follow – for strings (1959) and for clarinet, viola and piano (1979) – take Escher’s tonal idiom to its outer limits while always holding expressiveness and structural control, drama and technique, emotion and intellect in perfect balance. 3 CDs. Original 1988-97 Donemus releases.