With each successive release by Hector Olivera I find it increasingly difficult to describe it in superlatives that I haven’t used before.  Once again this is the situation with the release of ‘WITH PASSION’ performed, as the title rightly states, by this amazing keyboard virtuoso, on an un-specified model from the Roland Atelier organ range. Several of the items I can directly associate with the many years that I spent in the cinema world, so for me they bring back happy memories of epic productions such as SPARTACUS, SCHINDLER’S LIST, CINEMA PARADISO, and Dudley Moore’s ‘10’ which features Ravel’s BOLERO.   So if for nothing else these items are special to me.  The performances throughout this 9 track CD are so orchestrally perfect that I’d bet if any were played on a Classical radio station, without prior mention being made of the artist or instrument, there would be many music lovers and aficionados, who would find it impossible to say that they were not listening to a real orchestra.

     Is it any wonder that musicians and TV Producers the World over shy away from featuring such incredible instruments as those produced by Roland and Rodgers, for whom Hector works, tours and records.  They have good cause to be concerned!  As Hector well knows, one of my favourite film music composers is Ennio Morricone, he of ‘Once upon a time in America’ fame, and so I particularly enjoyed the hauntingly beautiful CINEMA PARADISO theme track because I too, was a young ‘Toto’ eager to learn everything about the movies from my projectionist ‘masters’.  It is nigh on impossible to pick out the track that isn’t my favourite, but believe me I doubt there is a better version of Ravel’s BOLERO on any other keyboard recording.  Other organists seem to believe that all they have to do is select a commencing registration and slowly and methodically build on it.  In fact it should be possible, as Hector demonstrates, to hear many instruments: flutes, bassoons, trumpets, oboes and clarinets individually adding their respective contributions in order to vary the texture and to create a gradual crescendo, leading to the cataclysmic ending.  The result? A performance here, of what is reputed to be one of the World’s most oft played pieces of music, which is over 11 minutes of sheer magical artistry.  The stirring CD opener is Khachaturian’s music for the 1960 four times Award winning ‘sword & sandal’ film SPARTACUS, which boasted a star studded cast with Kirk Douglas in the lead roll.  I suspect the next track, the main theme from FURINKAZAN, a story set in the time of the Civil War in the 16^th Century, will be new to most people, myself included, but the music however is alternately stirring and beautiful.

     The theme from SCHINDLERS LIST, a brilliantly realized true story set amongst the destruction and loss of life in the Holocaust, has proved to be popular concert item amongst many organists, and rightly so.  Hector succeeds in capturing the poignancy of this movie so beautifully.  Reviving his own childhood memories of the days when he, aged only 5 five years, played before Eva Peron in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Hector has included the broad and emotional theme DON’T CRY FOR ME ARGENTINA which Eva delivers from the balcony of the Casa Rosada to the assembled crowd. I must confess, until now, to not liking the composition, born out of the fact that I’ve heard so many organ recordings, which lacked the required interpretation to make it all come alive.  Again, this is an exercise in how this Andrew Lloyd Webber’s composition should be musically portrayed.

      DANCE MACABRE is a programmatic work: an orchestral tone poem if you like, where the musical events follow a specific narrative idea which in turn set up images in your mind.  Hector sets the scene with the bell tolling the customary 12 times, thus by doing so summons the ‘dead’ skeletons from their graves to dance to the sound of a solo violin, which they do until break of dawn, when they return to their graves until next Halloween.  This item is one of two in which we get to hear Hector featuring a new violin stop on the Roland Atelier: the other being a very exciting, and somewhat slightly different version of Monti’s famous CZARDAS, beloved by almost every ‘gypsy orchestra’ and written back around 1904.  It seems there is some uncertainty as to this being a work for solo violin or mandolin, so what does Hector do but to delightfully pair them up.  All too soon listeners come to the finale on this latest offering by the keyboard maestro …and what a finale it turns out to be.

     It’s the last complete Symphony, the No 9 by Beethoven, of which the poem ODE TO JOY forms part, and is that which most of us will instantly recognize.  It’s a 12-minute tour de force, which combines the organ design and talents of both Atelier and Hector Olivera.  The only thing missing is the customary standing ovation and applause, but it doesn’t take much to imagine that!  Keen Olivera collectors will note that three items have been recorded before on an earlier CD, but suffice it to say a decade has passed and both ‘man & machine’ have come a long way.   

Alan Ashton.