The ballade was Frank Martin's specialty. The Swiss composer wrote six of them throughout his long career, each featuring a different solo instrument or group of solo instruments. They are all from about 10 to 15 minutes in length, and like Samuel Barber's Essays for Orchestra, they pack a great deal of concentrated, communicative music into a very small space. The work for viola, wind, harp, harpsichord and percussion is a particularly colorful and evocative work, but then all of them are marvelously written and all too rarely encountered in the concert hall for the simple reason that they're too short. These performances are terrific. --David Hurwitz
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