It is not difficult to include Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga's entire orchestral output on CD, such as it is. The "Spanish Mozart" produced only three overtures and a symphony before his premature death at age 19.
Jordi Savall produced a great disc of the symphony, but included only two of the three overtures, for Astrée with Le Concert des Nations and
La Capella Reial de Catalunya in 1995. Fuga Libera's Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga: Música para Orquestra contains all three overtures in addition to the symphony, and while the performances don't have quite the mischievous sparkle of
Savall's,
Paul Dombrecht and the Belgian period-instrument orchestra achieve something quite different with Arriaga's music here. These readings are very solid and classical;
Dombrecht interprets Arriaga as though it were any other classical orchestral music and does not emphasize with any additional force the Stürm und Drang elements in the symphony. And it works; here Arriaga's orchestral music sounds closer to the spirit and sound exemplified by his string quartets than in other recordings, no mean feat given the great variability of Arriaga's output in general. And the Overture, Op. 20, missing from
Savall's recording, is certainly a work devotees of Arriaga will want to know; among the very last works Arriaga undertook, it makes clear that moving into the realm of full-blown romanticism wouldn't be difficult for Arriaga had he lived. Perhaps someday somebody will finally give us recordings of Arriaga's cantatas, but for the moment, Fuga Libera's Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga: Música para Orquestra is a very worthwhile addition to his recorded canon and, somehow miraculously, deftly avoids being rendered automatically irrelevant by the existence of the
Savall.