A disc of Spanish music from Russian performers living in Montreal is really no surprise; more than any other European national school, Spain's was a collaborative effort between homegrown composers and those who envied Iberia's warm climate and diverse folk traditions from afar. Violonchelo Español, in fact, includes music by Russian composers (Glazunov, Borodin, and Shchedrin's In Imitation of Albéniz) as well as Spaniards (Albéniz's omnipresent Malaguena, various Falla favorites, and two works by the cellist Gaspar Cassadò). Russian-Canadian cellist Yuli Turovsky is backed by the prolific chamber orchestra I Musici de Montréal in a nicely thought-out program of Spanish and Spanish-flavored standards. Very little of the music is heard in its original form, not that there's anything wrong with that; the liner notes point to the numerous instances in which arrangements have been made of most of these pieces in the past, and Turovsky generally succeeds in creating for himself an effective virtuoso vehicle of modest size. Some of the arrangements (several are by I Musici de Montréal violinist Madeleine Messier) work better than others. The neo-Classic works of Cassadò, including the three-movement Sonata in the Old Spanish Style, are ideally suited to the chamber orchestra medium, but some of the chestnuts on the album, like Falla's Ritual Fire Dance music from the ballet El amor brujo (1915), are so familiar in big orchestral performances, where the basses and cellos sound like a football team pounding its way through a stadium tunnel toward the field, that they come off as a bit thin here. Compounding this concern is Analekta's very smooth sound; a sharper glitter to Turovsky's cello and the orchestral strings would have strengthened the presentation. On balance, though, this is an attractive program that makes sense; it's just the kind of thing North American ensembles need to move toward as they try to cultivate new audiences. And Turovsky has the commanding presence to pull it off.