Mompou: Dues Arabesques

The music on this sixth album of the piano music of Frederic Mompou presents works recently discovered by Jordi Masó in the Biblioteca de Catalunya’s Mompou Collection and at Mompou’s home. All were written between 1910–18 and show a highly gifted young composer whose musical idiom was already well formed.

The recording complements Masó’s previous volumes released on Naxos (8554332, 8554448, 8554570, 8554727 and 8570956). “Masó is a strong pianist completely at home in this idiom” American Record Guide.

From 1910 to 1920, Mompou was constantly searching for his personal sound and he wrote many small pieces, impressions and pieces with different generic names, many of which represented musical ideas which he reworked on different occasions. All the pieces on this CD date from this period and include Preludi, Dues Arabesques, Pessebres and many impressions.

All the pieces presented here remained unpublished during Mompou’s lifetime. Many of them came to light in 2008 when his apartment was being cleared out and three folders were unearthed filled with manuscripts containing his first attempts at composition. Thanks to the support of the Frederic Mompou Foundation, most of these scores have now been published. The rest of the programme comes from a smaller collection of material housed in the Bibliotheca Nacional de Catalunya’s Mompou Collection.