Our Recording of the Month for October is colourful, though neglected music by Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970), a Catalan-born, Spanish composer who relocated to England to escape the civil war. There he became a leading representative of the avant-garde.

The two ballet scores recorded here – Don Quixote and Alegrías – are wonderfully Spanish in the manner of mid-period Falla and conducted by Juanjo Mena, a specialist in Spanish and Latin music who has previously recorded dazzling discs of music by Falla, Turina, Montsalvatge and Ginastera for Chandos.

Clive Paget caught up with the conductor to learn more about an important figure in Spanish music.

What and when was your first encounter with the music of Roberto Gerhard? And what was your reaction?

It was thanks to my composition teacher at the Escuela de Música Jesús Guridi in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Carmelo Bernaola. He set his students an orchestration assignment to study Gerhard’s 1941 Suite from Don Quixote – Bernaola was a great master of orchestration, so the idea was very interesting to me. We worked in detail, looking at how Gerhard orchestrated the most beautiful, most dramatic, most intense phrases, and also working ourselves to orchestrate these passages and discussing which orchestrations were successful,...