Siesta Ensemble & Ovidio Gimenez Bassoon Delights

Listening to the music on this two-disc set, you may wonder why the chamber works of Swedish Romantic composer Franz Berwald are not more frequently recorded. It can't be because of his themes, which are strong, sweet, and distinctive; or because of his harmonies, which are powerful, rich, and cogent; or because of his forms, which are innovative, inventive, and indestructible. The only possible reason for this music's neglect is that there's only so much room in the world for great music, and unfortunately, Berwald, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Dvorák have apparently already occupied all the space allocated to chamber music of the Romantic period. Still, anyone listening to the music on this two-disc set will have to wonder if there's not enough room for Berwald, too.

One of the hallmarks of Hans Werner Henze's music is the ingenuity of his orchestration. From his chamber music to his operas, he uses apparently eccentric combinations of instruments to achieve effects of a timbral delicacy and transparency that mitigate the harmonic complexity and melodic spikiness of the music and give it an immediate sonic appeal. This CD includes works that beautifully illustrate the principle.

Following their debut album, Belle Epoque, the Orsino Ensemble turns its attention to music from Bohemia. There is a strong tradition of Czech wind playing, and hence a wealth of great repertoire on which to draw. Antoine Reicha was a contemporary (and friend) of Beethoven. His E flat Quintet, published in 1817, demonstrates his harmonic ingenuity and talent for idiomatic instrumental writing.

This disc contains some sonatas for wind instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach from his years in Weimar (1708-17) and Cöthen (1717-23), having in common – as they have come down to us or as several musicologists have proposed – their being intended for the recorder and/or the oboe. The interchangeability of instrumentation, linked to different creative periods, to practical contingencies, and to the inexhaustible desire for perfection that induced the genius of Eisenach, according to the testimony of his earliest biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, to continually revise his own works, often makes it difficult to go beyond their sterile catalogue dates in tracing their evolution. For this reason an experimental approach was chosen here, to bring back to their presumably original state what today is a handful of works, which were part of a much larger repertory. Chamber music was becoming the composer’s principal occupation in the time period under consideration, which was decisive in the progress of Bach’s career from organist to Konzertmeister (1714) and then to Kapellmeister of a Calvinist court (1717) essentially devoted to the cultivation of secular music.

Ensemble Zefiro, a period instrument group, give careful, attentive readings of Mozart’s two big octet serenades. In each case the opening movement is rather deliberate but very exactly judged in terms of dynamics and accentuation, and collectively very efficiently and precisely executed. The remaining movements are taken quite quickly, especially the minuets (the second of K375 seems unduly so and the trio is done much more slowly; while the canonic one in K388 is a little lightweight).

The gorgeous early music releases of France's Alpha label, each illustrated with a relevant painting along with discussion of both the music and the artwork, offer a splendid introduction to the culture of the ancien régime. The discussions get down to the kind of depth that academics traffic in, yet the performances are by and large sensuous ones entrusted to some of France's best historical-instrument ensembles.

Ausgezeichnet mit einem Echo Klassik 2008 als »Instrumentalistin des Jahres« begeistert die Meisterin der Blockflöte immer mehr Menschen für dieses Instrument. Und in den Medien nicht nur die Fachpresse. Die Zeitschrift Brigitte etwa schrieb über sie: »Dorothee Oberlinger spielt mit einer Virtuosität und Bandbreite an Klangfarben, wie man sie niemals von diesem Instrument erwartet hätte.« Auf ihrer neuen CD präsentiert die Künstlerin Werke von Telemann, begleitet vom Ensemble 1700. In Telemanns außerordentlich umfangreichem Werk findet sich ein großes Repertoire für Blockflöte. Die hier eingespielten Werke, eine Solofantasie sowie Solo- und Triosonaten, stellen einen exemplarischen Ausschnitt aus Telemanns Flötenkammermusik dar und spiegeln die gesamte Bandbreite seines kompositorischen Schaffens wider.