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Even if it were only a subconscious design gesture, the palindromic arrangement of program on this CD offers itself as a scheme that can give unity to disparate elements and that can champion cohesion through diversity. Perhaps a superficial coherence comes from the fact that the music is all by Spanish composers, even if composed over a period of more than four hundred and fifty years. The central axis of the program is a group of four fantasias by the extraordinary vihuelist Miguel de Fuenllana (c.1525-c.1585 or later). For instrumentalists of the sixteenth century, the fantasia was the most abstract and quintessentially instrumental of all genres, directly analogous in conceptual terms to the sonata of later periods and represented here by the works of Joan Manén (1883-1971) and Eduardo López-Chavarri (1871-1970), composed in the nationalistic and neo-classical by-waters of the twentieth century, and the exterior pillars of the program. Threaded between these architecturally-based works are compositions by two living composers, Félix Ibarrindo (1943-) and Inés Badalo (1989-) that come from a world of freely progressing sonic exploration of sounds of the sixties, and sounds of today.

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