Rolf

Rolf Kuhn's decades-long presence on the jazz scene was a stroke of luck and a gift. Rolf Kuhn was an exceptional artist, a German jazz musician of the highest caliber, one of the very few with international standing. Kuhn had no idea it would be his last recording when he met with his quartet at Berlin's Hansa Studio in late June 2022. In August that year he sadly passed away. His compositions, whether balladic or fast-paced and driving, always left room for what jazz meant to him: creating music together, letting it take flight through improvisation that thrived from listening and feeling.

Bruckner entered new musical territory with his Sixth Symphony. The meandering harmonies, intricate rhythms and imaginative orchestration are coupled with contrasting moods and a theme that pleasantly moves from dark to light.

The works of the theorbist Bellerofonte Castaldi and the guitarist Domenico Pellegrini are little known but nonetheless remain fascinating to their performers today, as they not only give clear proof of fertile musical imagination but also raise many questions about how they should be performed. Although Castaldi was the first to praise the innovative style of his friend Monteverdi, his works are marked by a strong Renaissance spirit. Castaldi and Pellegrini chose not only the most classical forms (dances, courantes, galliards) but also the most archaic (branles, batailles, canzoni). Lutenist, theorbist and baroque guitarist Albane Imbs now presents her first solo album after having founded her own ensemble, Les Kapsber'girls and played in ensembles led by Jordi Savall, François Lazarevitch, Raphaël Pichon and Rolf Lislevand, the great Norwegian lutenist/theorbist who was her teacher. Here, Imbs and Lislevand perform Castaldi’s Capricci a due stromenti, the only example of music written for a duo of theorbo and tiorbino, this latter being a miniature theorbo conceived and played by Castaldi himself.

According to current research, Paul Wranitzky composed at least 47 symphonies for which sources have been preserved. The symphonies Opp. 50 and 51 belong to Wranitzky's last series of symphonies. They were published in late 1804 by Wranitzky's main publisher, André, in Offenbach. The Symphony in D major, Op. 37, was published by the same publisher in November 1799. All three works recognizably follow Haydn's model in structure, movement types, and thematic formation, though not without setting individual accents. For example, the opening and closing movements are not thematic in the true sense of the word; Wranitzky treats his motivic material more like a musical construction kit; identical material is used in different places with different functions. The motivic material is deliberately kept simple, but possesses enough specificity to give the individual movements motivic coherence. And once again, the composer's "melodic inventiveness, the effectively juxtaposed rhythms and the effectively exploited orchestral apparatus".

This is a delightful record that features the woody clarinet of Rolf Kuhn in a variety of amicable settings. There’s an ethereal group with Dave Liebman's soprano sax and Chuck Loeb's guitar, raucous collaborations with Randy Brecker's groups, clarinet pairings with Buddy DeFranco and Eddie Daniels on boppish runs and ballads, the angular abstraction of a duet with Albert Manglesdorf, and the closer, a sweet harmolodic dance with Ornette Coleman.