Sonatas by Garreta and Gerhard

The cello was one of Juli Garreta’s most beloved instruments. Intimate friends with Pau Casals and Bonaventura Dini, he dedicated various works to them for cello and piano. Mar plana, premiered with Dini himself and with Enric Granados on piano. It corresponds to a romantic model, in a single movement, heir to Chopin and Grieg who he admired. By contrast, the Sonata in F major is part of a set of large-format compositions, rooted in the Germanic tradition of Beethoven and Brahms. Pau Casals, dedicatee of the work, performed it often, but it practically disappeared from concert programmes after the 1930s. Decades later, in London, Robert Gerhard rewrote an old sonata for viola and turned it into the Sonata for cello, which alternates serialism and popular elements with the heterodoxy that characterizes Gerhard’s music.

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