With his new CD Esteban Elizondo Iriarte presents the Basque composer Padre Tomás de Elduayen (1882-1953), another representative of Basque organ romanticism. Tomás de Elduayen, born in the Basque provinces, lived first in Chile and then in Argentina where he was able to combine his pastoral work with musical practice. In 1920 he came back to Spain. In this time he started publishing his first compositions. Between 1910-20 he published several works for organ in the magazine "Música Sacro-Hispana", mostly preludes on Basque themes as well as his cycle “The Seven Last Words” for voice and organ. His contemporaries gave favourable descriptions of his music: “…he developed a chromatic style which, as a result, led to a more direct, more personal musical language based on free, impressionist harmonies with some excursions into polytonality.”

This CD has been recorded on the biggest organ of Spain: the cathedral del Buen Pastor (of the good shepherd) in San Sebastián houses a five-manual neoclassicistic instrument with 125 stops built by the company Organería Española SA from Azpeitia in 1954. It combines elements of the baroque with symphonic timbres, with many mutation stops and two open 32' pedal stops. There are elements of the Iberian organ there, too, in the form of a big Trompetería.