Ricard Lamote de Grignon was a Catalan composer who came of age in the last years of the Spanish Republican period; his father was Joan Lamote de Grignon, who was a prominent conductor and composer of the time. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War sent father and son fleeing to Valencia, where Joan founded the local municipal orchestra and Ricard worked as assistant conductor. Returning to his native Barcelona in January 1939 to pick up the Granados Award for the Quatre petites pastorales recorded there, Ricard Lamote de Grignon arrived just as the Falangists entered to take over Barcelona and wound up being thrown in jail for a lengthy stay. Although the experience marked him deeply and impacted his physical well-being, eventually he found work scoring Spanish films and, in the last years of his life, was named to the post of assistant conductor to the Barcelona Municipal Orchestra, along with his good friend Eduardo Toldrá. This La mà de Guido CD,
The Music of Ricard Lamote de Grignon & Eduard Toldrá: Petites pastorales, Music for Chamber Orchestra, focuses on the output of concert music that Ricard created for chamber orchestras and appends a single, short piece that Toldrá composed in honor of his friend. Born a mere four years apart, both composers died in 1962.
Ricard's chamber orchestral music is very low key and wanders a course between the neo-classic, light music and the sensuous string scoring associated with the late romantic; there is a slight use of impressionistic coloring, as well. While the music is primarily melodic, the melodies are not themselves strongly memorable and it has appeal in its easy fluidity and folksiness; moreover, there is no small amount of poetry just in the eloquence of its scoring. One can easily hear how Ricard's musical personality would be an ideal match for the medium of film, though at least two of the pieces represented here were written long before he ever scored a motion picture. This La mà de Guido recording, however, has numerous flaws; it is recorded very quietly, as though the band were playing in the next room, and there are signs of lazy playing here and there; tempi are not crisp and sometimes the intonation is a little slack. This is the Orquestra de Cambra Terassa 48 led by
Adolf Pla, and it plays much of this music as if it was merely reading it off the page. This group generally works without a conductor, so it's hard to say whether the addition of
Pla to the podium is the source of the dull ensemble sound. The liveliest music on the whole disc is the short piece of Toldrá placed at the end. However, one cannot imagine a sudden flood of alternate choices for Ricard Lamote de Grignon entering the market, so to get to know his work as this is adequate, though only barely so.