Performers
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
Elisabete Matos (soprano)

Works
Debussy: La Mer
Falla: The Three-Cornered Hat (excerpts)
Boulez: Notations I-IV, VII

Producer
Hans Hadulla

It's sometimes said that there are fewer great conductors around these days than great pianists. Daniel Barenboim is one of those rare musicians who can claim to be both. Over his 50 years in music he has grown from being a precocious young talent to being - in the best sense of the word - a maestro in charge of one of the world's great orchestras, the Chicago Symphony.

This programme features Barenboim the conductor, leading a concert, recorded at the 2000 MusikTriennale festival the Cologne Philharmonic Hall, which celebrates three very different masterworks of the 20th century.

Pierre Boulez's Notations I-IV and VII are cerebral works, whose beauty is on a structural level - the satisfaction of, say, a Bach sonata, but with modern angles and shapes.

On the other hand, Manuel de Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat (El sombrero de tres picos) is instantly appealing music to both head and heart: the passion and fire of popular Spanish music brought magnificently into the concert hall.

And Debussy's La Mer is one of those unusual works which is both 'important' yet also 'popular': an impressionistic evocation of the elemental power of the sea. Of course, its portrait is of natural forces and our emotional reaction to them, rather than a picture of any particular sea. Which is just as well, because the actual stretch of water Debussy was looking at when he finished the work was the English Channel viewed from the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, where the composer was staying!