More than most other composers, Mompou's art defies description, if only because it is so unlike anyone else's. Walter Starkie's entry on Mompou in the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954), for instance, resorts to quotations from Debussy, Enoch Soames, and Sir Thomas Browne to suggest his music's mixture of the sophisticated and primitive, hieratic and childlike, recondite and popular, spare simplicity, and incantatory repetitiveness, and so on. While nearly all of Mompou's work takes the form of sets of piano miniatures, the Ten Préludes make almost an index to his art, despite—or because of—their having been composed in two sets separated by more than a dozen years. The first four occupied Mompou, a slow confectioner, from 1927 to 1930, while the second group was not started until 1943. To Starkie's conspectus one might add that, in their melding of the familiar and strange, their knowing naïveté, they suggest meditations upon Alice in Wonderland. And while Mompou is not concerned with form in a formal sense, he is intensely concerned to strike a keenly suave balance between concealing and revealing. The Prélude No. 1, for instance, opens with the mien of a plangent lament only to turn oddly noncommittal by its end. The second suggests a keening song for cornemuse framing a dance fraught with the seriousness of children at play. Does No. 3 resonate to the cracked bells of a surreal dimension? The chorale-like Prélude No. 4 begins with confident faith to lose itself in doubt—the chorale returns, but with an oddly disconsolate air.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi