Siesta Ensemble & Ovidio Gimenez Bassoon Delights

Warmhearted but clear-eyed, the Schubert Ensemble of London's recordings of the Piano Quartets of Fauré are anything but French performances. Where French performers can parse their emotions down to the most infinitesimal gradation of feeling but are intellectually profoundly superficial, these English performers are intellectually clear and lucid, but their interpretations are still deeply felt.

Canadian bassoonist George Zukerman is an artiste , a man whose agile command of this difficult instrument is apparent at his first entry in the Mozart concerto. His technique dazzles and his wonderfully sweet and lyrical tone is a perfect match for the cantabile style of the slow movements. Jörg Faerber and the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra have been around for years, and even though the period-instrument movement has encroached upon much of their turf, the 30-year-old-plus playing isn’t dated and can stand comparison with the best now available.

Stemming from the same fertile compositional period as the majority of his clarinet works, composer Carl Maria von Weber was also hard at work penning two symphonies (in fact, his only two forays into this genre) and his lone Concerto for bassoon and orchestra. Though written only a few short years after Beethoven's revolutionary Third Symphony, Weber seems little interested in innovation apart from his use of scherzos in place of minuets.

There were lots of theatrical Rousseaus in the 18th century and Jean-Jacques (1712–78) was only the most famous of them. A fair amount of the intellectual impulse of Romanticism can be traced to (or blamed on) him. A poseur and charlatan in the grand format, this music copyist also found time to compose music, and this is his most enduring piece. Indeed, it is his only enduring music.