Classical review: Skalkottas: Concerto for Two Violin; Concertino for Two Pianos; etc, Demertzis/Papanas/Asteriadou/ Samaltanos/Desyllas/Thessaloniki State SO/Christopoulos

Over the last decade Bis has been working its way through the works of the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas (1904-49), who studied with Schoenberg in the late 1920s and early 30s, and returned to Athens to work on his own method of serial composition, but whose music mostly went unperformed in his lifetime. Even today, much of his huge yet uneven output remains hardly known, and previous issues in this series have been hit-and-miss affairs. This, though, is very much one of the hits. The Concerto for Two Violins was composed at the end of the second world war, though Skalkottas never wrote out a full score and the orchestration was only completed after his death. It's an extraordinarily dense and ambitious piece, with distinct neoclassical outlines but binding the two solo instruments into the constantly shifting, close-meshed orchestral textures, and providing just a glimpse of light in the central slow movement, which quotes from a Greek popular song. The two-piano Concertino from 1935 is more obviously Schoenbergian in its keyboard and orchestral writing, and so less personal in its style, but both works suggest a genuinely original musical voice.