Five Pines

So here’s one of the hardest things to reckon with as a critic: you find a debut album pretty much by accident on Bandcamp, the opening track and lead-off single blows your mind, and you happen to discover that the album itself is one of the best of its respective year…

These 20 CDs comprise over 25 hours of music captured on-stage in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s at KWKH’s legendary Louisiana Hayride radio show. Staged live in Shreveport, the Hayride featured national country music stars, soon-to-be legends, regional break-outs, and talented newcomers. Most of this music has not been heard since the day it was broadcasted.

Conservative in his musical style as in his politics – rightly or wrongly the whiff of Fascism hangs over his name – Ottorino Respighi is remembered today almost exclusively for the blazing triptych of Roman tone poems. He also, however, produced a corpus of chamber, keyboard and vocal works, not to mention operas and orchestral pieces, many of which are crying out to be rediscovered. Slowly they are finding their way into concert programmes and on to record, and this disc from the Ambache should bring three of them a well-deserved wider currency. The superb Piano Quintet in F minor occasionally recalls Franck (who wrote one in the same key), but its piano-dominated lyrical effusion is wholly individual. The substantial ten-minute first movement is inadequately balanced by a two-minute Andantino and four-minute scherzo-like Vivacissimo, however, and it is possible that a finale has somehow become detached.