Chamber Music

Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers, with one performer to a part (in contrast to orchestral music, in which each string part is played by a number of performers). However, by convention, it usually does not include solo instrument performances.

Ketil Hvoslef (b. 1939) is a productive, versatile and undogmatic composer who even now, in his 80's continues to write music at a furious pace.

Confessing to a thirty-year love affair with the music of Mexico, Scottish tenor Jamie MacDougall enthusiastically joins forces with Delphian regulars Mr McFall’s Chamber, whose involvement in Latin American music goes back nearly as far.

The colourful folk melodies and rhythms of Spain knit seamlessly with twentieth-century French compositional sophistication in Joaquín Turina’s chamber works. Born in Seville, Andalucia, the young composer went to study in Paris in 1905, where he was greatly attracted to the forward-looking style of the likes of Debussy—however, his musical course was altered when he encountered countrymen Falla and Albéniz, who encouraged him to write in a style that fully embraced his Andalucian musical heritage. Later in life the composer himself explained ‘my music is the expression of the feeling of a true Sevillian who did not know Seville until he left it’. The acclaimed Nash Ensemble here demonstrate what a satisfying artistic homecoming he made.

Something new by Haydn? Well, yes and no… None of the works presented on this album has ever been heard in this form in our time. Michael Dücker, director and spiritus rector of nuovo aspetto, has gone in libraries and archives in search of Haydn works that are ideally suited for the chamber music-apart instrumentation of the ensemble nuovo aspetto. Michael Dücker has carefully re-edited the originals and adapted them to today's musical requirements. The result is a fascinating project with amazingly contemporary-sounding chamber music versions of various Haydn works.

This recording marks the beginning of a new series devoted to previously unrecorded chamber works by the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe (1909-96). The music was written from the 1950s to the 1980s and ranges wide, all the way from the playful to the serious. Holmboe's inexhaustible wealth of ideas and his mixture of lightness and ingenuity run through all the works. As does his 'metamorphosis' technique, which makes the music breathe and grow like the Nordic landscape of which Holmboe felt himself to be a part.