In the early hours of 21 January 1958, the conductor Ataúlfo Argenta turned the key in the ignition of his Austin A90 Six Westminster. His wife and five children were asleep at home while he was warming up with his lover at the time in her freezing garage. The carbon monoxide fumes overcame them, and weakened by tuberculosis, Argenta’s lungs gave out. He was 44 years old, and his death sent the Spanish world of music into shock.

Argenta had galvanised Spanish orchestral culture through his command of the Orquesta Nacional de España, while also becoming the first Spanish conductor to achieve international recognition through making records abroad for major labels, notably Decca. Potential successors to build on his legacy did not immediately present themselves, and the gears of General Franco’s government ground slow with apathy and inertia in the cultural sphere. Not until 1962 was the 28-year-old Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos appointed as the new director of the Orquesta Nacional de España, though he had given many concerts with the orchestra during the protracted interregnum.

Inaugurating his tenure with an all-Falla programme, including the recent, posthumous completion of Atlántida by Ernesto Halffter, Frühbeck undertook a mission of consolidation and incremental progress in building a culture of excellence for classical music in Spain, true to his Hispano-German roots. He had been born in 1933 in the Castilian city of Burgos. His father was Wilhelm Frühbeck, a lens-maker, who had fled his native Bavaria and the looming spectre of fascism with his fiancée Stephanie. From the frying-pan into the fire: the newly married Frühbeck couple, now known as Guillermo and Estefania, must have been dismayed to discover they had moved to Franco’s seat of power during the Second Republic and the bitter years of the Spanish Civil War.

Encouraged principally by Estefania, Rafael took up the violin, and at the age of sixteen he moved to Madrid as a pupil at the conservatoire. In order to mollify his father, he studied law alongside harmony and composition, but he soon got a job as the deputy conductor of a musical revue show. Once conscripted, he obtained a post in the Santander regiment as a military band conductor and pursued this path after the war at the Hochschule in Munich, studying with Kurt Eichhorn. Thus, in 1958, he became conductor of the municipal orchestra in Bilbao.

As the new director of the Orquesta Nacional de España, Frühbeck established new annual traditions of performing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at Passiontide, and Beethoven’s Ninth at the turn of the year. He inherited from Argenta a legacy of Schumann and Brahms interpretations and developed it with a young man’s exuberance. Looking back in 1992, he declared himself proudest of the Mahler Festival staged in 1970–71, which did for the composer in Madrid what Mitropoulos had done in New York a decade earlier.

The fiery, confident maestro of those early years is the personality captured by Decca in their London-made recordings from 1965 onwards, encapsulated by the headlong rush to the double bar at the close of Schumann’s ‘Rhenish’ Symphony. By then Frühbeck had added the handle to his name (though not his passport): ‘When I started to go abroad,’ he explained in 1994, ‘I was told that my name didn’t sound very Spanish, that I could pass as Austrian, German, Czech … I got tired of always giving explanations and so I incorporated the Burgos thing, because it’s where I’m from.’ Until his death in 2014, however, he was universally known in Spain simply as Frühbeck.

His name (with and without the handle) appears in The Times from 1966 onwards, conducting the London orchestras principally as a concerto-accompanist to more illustrious names – the violinist Nathan Milstein in Glazunov, the young Bruno Leonardo Gelber in Brahms, followed by second-half orchestral workouts (‘let us hope this was Mr Frühbeck’s first assault on The Rite of Spring’). A decade later, he led the Royal Philharmonic’s centenary tribute to Falla, conducting Nights in the Gardens of Spain and La vida breve, and two years later, the German Requiem of Brahms in St. Paul’s Cathedral (‘judiciously unhurried tempi’). In 1980, his approach to Verdi’s Requiem reminded William Mann ‘more of Malcolm Sargent than, say, Giulini or de Sabata.’

Not unlike Sargent, Frühbeck was in his element when leading choirs in what the Spanish critics called ‘macro-concerts’, putting on a show, revelling in the occasion – and working tirelessly. His pragmatic approach to his craft would surely have won a nod of approval from Sargent: ‘An orchestra needs conductors who show authority in the best sense of the word,’ Frühbeck remarked to Jesús Ruiz Mantilla in 1998, ‘in the artistic sense, not in the sense of a general’s stripes, but someone who demonstrates important things in rehearsals and concerts; because if this is not the case, they get angry, and quite right too, because many orchestras are fed up with charlatans who think that just because they have a stick in their hand, they are something special.’

Frühbeck’s appetite for conducting took him to Schumann’s one-time home of Düsseldorf as music director (1966–71) and thence to a string of posts in Montreal, Berlin, Vienna, Turin, Dresden and finally Copenhagen, as chief conductor of the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra. He nearly did die with his boots on, as he wished, conducting his last concert in Washington just three months before his death. Similar to his list of appointments, his recorded legacy is scattered across several labels, taking in these Decca and DG albums alongside a deeper catalogue of mainly Spanish and choral repertoire recorded for Columbia and EMI, and digital-era albums for Collins Classics (made in London), Genuin (Dresden) and Da Capo (Copenhagen).

The eventual death of Franco in 1975 brought democracy to modern Spain and in its wake a slow changing of the cultural guard which led to the replacement of Frühbeck with the Catalan conductor Antoni Ros-Marbà as director of the Orquesta Nacional de España in 1978. ‘The Frühbeck Affair’ played out with some rancour in the pages of El País, and in retrospect the conservative programming of the weekly Friday-evening concerts at the Teatro Real, before a loyal audience of subscribers paying for their tickets a tiny fraction of what the orchestra received in state subsidy, could hardly be sustained.

Reflecting on those times in 1992, for a special issue of Scherzo dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the orchestra, Frühbeck maintained that he had tendered his resignation before being asked to stay and then shown the front door. He pointed to the low quality of conservatoire education in Spain, the creation of the state-broadcasting orchestra, sclerotic administrative incompetence and the enforced move of the Orquesta Nacional de España to the new but acoustically inferior Auditorio Nacional as challenges which he had overcome during his tenure: ‘Let us never forget that destroying an orchestra takes no more than three months; building a great orchestra takes 25 years of work, at least!’

Once the dust had settled, Frühbeck nonetheless returned to conduct the Orquesta Nacional de España (and eventually, in 1985, even the RTVE orchestra), and was welcomed back as an elder statesman who had won laurels abroad and could still stir up both performers and audiences as an old-school maestro and a reassuring guarantor of authority in the Spanish and Austro-German repertoire which, perhaps not coincidentally, had been the focus of his activity for Decca.

Much of the unfamiliar Spanish repertoire curated for this set warrants a brief introduction. In their original piano version, the eight sketches of Spain composed by Albéniz in the late 1880s and 1890s, posthumously collected and issued by a German publisher as the Suite española Op. 47, have become relatively well known, not least thanks to the Decca recording made by Alicia de Larrocha. Ranging widely across Spain’s disparate regions, the pieces both invite illustration on the canvas of a full orchestra, and at the same time resist translation of their thoroughly pianistic idiom.

It will be evident from the opening flourish of ‘Castile’ in Frühbeck’s own orchestration that he leant into familiar notions of what the sound of Spanish music means to foreign listeners, with the familiar clack of castanets which belong to the flamenco tradition of Granada rather than to any folk tradition native to the Castilian region, some hundreds of kilometres to the north. This vibrant seguidilla is placed seventh in the piano suite, and followed by an evocation of Cuba which Frühbeck omits and replaces with a flamenco-accented sketch of Córdoba from the Cantos de España Op. 232. He later produced an orchestration of ‘Cuba’ for a second recording of the Suite, made with the Orquesta Nacional de España and released by Conifer Classics in 1998, as the first album in a projected series that never materialised.

In other respects, however, the conductor’s orchestration pays faithful tribute to both the letter and spirit of Albeniz’s score. In any case, the Catalan Albéniz also took a liberal approach to specific regional musical signatures: the rhythm of ‘Asturias’ (named after another northern region) is pure Andalucian flamenco. His fellow Catalan Xavier Montsalvatge largely dispensed with such local colour in his Concerto breve of 1952; indeed, the sweeping string-writing belongs more to the sound of Hollywood, filtered through piano-concerto exemplars by Ravel and Rachmaninoff, than to anything identifiably Spanish beyond inherited harmonic habits such as an unstable, major-minor seventh.

Despite its title, the concerto is not especially brief, nor even light in mood. The most striking melody arrives at the start of the slow movement: a melancholy solo for the cor anglais which is an inverted version of a motif from the first movement, and further transformed into a rumba in the finale. Montsalvatge later adopted his own form of twelve-tone writing, but the bluesy, modal flavour of the piano writing in the Concerto breve belongs to the world of Ravel and Bartók.

The language of flamenco stretches the standard twelve-note diatonic system with the kind of squeezed and expanded intervals that Bartók harvested from folk tunes across Bulgaria and Hungary. This ‘flamenco scale’ is the basis of the Piano Concerto written in 1973 by Carlos Suriñach: another Catalan composer inspired by Alicia de Larrocha, though in his case also by the mindset of the flamenco musician, who ‘stays within his own selective area just as the Hindu musician will stay within his “rāg” or scale. It is an instinctive reflex not an intellectual one, although the music is sensuous and not without academic implications.’

Like Montsalvatge, Suriñach links all three movements through a continuous narrative thread and motivic connections. In acknowledging ‘the historic mainstream of melody and rhythm as sources of development,’ he invites a comparison with a separate Russian (or rather Soviet) strand of piano writing, as represented in this collection by Khachaturian’s concerto, especially in the mechanical rapidity and repetition of the finale.

What Larrocha did for the Spanish piano concerto, enlarging its repertoire with commissions which would be guaranteed performances by their soloist’s renown and personal commitment, so Narciso Yepes did for the guitar. Maurice Ohana began work on the Tres gráficos for him in 1950, completing it in 1957, though this concerto in all but name had to wait until 1961 for its premiere (in a BBC studio broadcast on the Third Programme). Yepes recorded it the same year, with Frühbeck de Burgos, and that recording is presented here together with a later one from 1974, in the conductor’s sole album for Deutsche Grammophon.

The title refers to three ‘diagrams’ of traditional forms of cante jondo (‘deep song’), an earlier style of Andalusian folk music which later evolved into flamenco. Ohana replaces the singer with a solo guitar, and the guitar’s original, accompanying role is taken up by the orchestra, though he also took inspiration from the Caprichos of Goya and the Desastres of Picasso. He left several alternative versions of different passages which the soloist is invited to select in a controlled-chance, quasi-improvisational procedure lying in degree somewhere between the cadenza spots left in their concertos by Mozart and Beethoven, and the ‘ad libitum’ passages of works by Lutosławski from the 1970s and 80s.

The movements are named after three different styles of flamenco: Farruca, Siguiriyas and Buleria, separated by cadenzas and concluded with a tiento. The figures of each style are reduced to skeletons and then reanimated with modern harmony. Ohana brings to life a battle for the form itself, with the guitarist standing obstinate against the percussive attacks of the orchestra in the Siguiriyas before conceding defeat in the finale, with ‘the gaiety of those funerals that are also the last family reunion’, in the words of an early French review, as though Ohana were throwing out moth-eaten ideas of Spanish music in order to revive their essence.

In similar vein, the Andalusian pianist and composer Antonio Ruiz-Pipó took inspiration both from cante jondo and from more recent visual art in his Tablas (‘Paintings’) commissioned by the Spanish state broadcaster RTVE and written between 1968 and 1972 (the title of each movement bears its completion date). Ruiz-Pipó wished ‘to make the guitar speak in the language of a man who feels Andalusian, with the atavistic knowledge of the melos of southern Spain.’ The idiom, all the same, is at several removes from the romantic folklorism of Albeniz: Ruiz-Pipó studied in Barcelona and then settled in Paris, a journey which brought a Stravinskian astringency to his technique.

A generation earlier, Salvador Bacarisse had also moved to Paris, in an act of self-exile after Franco formally took control of Spain in 1939. He continued to compose while working for French radio and TV, in a neoclassical idiom that found a fitting outlet in the concerto genre which modernists had abandoned. Alongside concertante pieces for violin, cello, harpsichord and piano which have recently enjoyed a revival, he produced this A minor Concerto for Yepes in 1952, centring on a neo-Mozartian Romance by the side of which the Concierto de Aranjuez sounds experimentally radical.

A musical conservative who stayed in Spain, Federico Moreno Torroba composed for Andrés Segovia at one end of his long career, and Plácido Domingo at the other. Yepes gave the premiere of the Homenaje a la Seguidilla in 1962, but Moreno Torroba revised it before conducting the final, definitive version in 1975: this 1965 recording represents an interim state of the piece. Within the Classical form, he switches between seguidilla and siguiriya styles; nostalgia is tempered by lively dialogue with individual members of the orchestra (such as the cello solos in the first and second movements), and solo writing that flows between recitative and soliloquy.

Peter Quantrill