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ID: RES10179
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Brass Collection
Subcollection: Horn
The Prince Regent's Band (Richard Fomison, Richard Thomas, Anneke Scott, Phil Dale & Jeff Miller - saxhorns)
During the mid-nineteenth century the Distin Family blazed a trail across Europe and North America performing countless concerts and promoting new and exciting designs of brass instruments. thanks to a chance meeting with Adolphe Sax in Paris in 1844, they adopted the new valved brass instruments, and in particular the new saxhorn.
With The Celebrated Distin Family, period brass specialists The Prince Regent’s Band have recreated the lost Distin Family repertoire, performing on their unique collection of original saxhorns and other fascinating brass instruments of the period. |
| 18.00 eur Buy |
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ID: CC2022
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Oboe
The 20-page full colour CD booklet has a 3,000 word programme note in English with full details of each track.
There are biographies of the players, web links and many photographs.
Introduction by Jeremy Polmear:
In the realm of chamber music the combination of oboe, horn and piano is an unusual one. The string quartet medium reigns supreme in its ability to inspire great works from great composers. There are many reasons for this, one being that in a string quartet each instrument has its own character, but all are of the same family so that they can also blend as a unit. Each can add its voice on equal terms to the others, speaking the same language but with its own individual accent.
By contrast the wind quintet of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn is all just that - contrast. Each instrument occupies its own sound-world, its own unique colour. This is what makes these instruments so valuable in an orchestra, but can be a challenge in a chamber music context. It takes a very skilful composer - and skilful performers too - to create satisfying blends with these instruments.
It is perhaps no accident that when Mozart wrote chamber music for flute, oboe, clarinet, and horn, he did so individually, in works with strings. Or he added a piano to smooth out the sound, as in the celebrated Quintet K452 with oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn. On this CD we have done something similar with his Horn Quintet K407; although the violin part is now on the oboe, the two violas and cello are given to the piano.
And it is the piano that is the key to the possibilities of the trio with oboe and horn. Even when it is an accompanying role it can provide a mellow presence and a solid harmonic basis, over which the other instruments can sing. This is true in the Mozart, and also in the two short nineteenth century pieces recorded here, by Blanc and Molbe.
And what of the other two instruments? The US horn player Cynthia Carr, in the introduction to her repertoire list of music for the trio, puts it thus: "This ensemble - comprised of the most distinctive-sounding woodwind instrument and the most versatile member of the brass family - presents a rich tonal palette and can produce a wide range of textures, from delicate and transparent to full and orchestral." This can be seen in this CD particularly in the Herzogenberg Trio Op 60 (1889), and in the way that Jean-Michel Damase makes full, and delightful, play of all the possibilities in his Trio of 1990. The oboe cannot match the horn in terms of dynamic range, but its timbre means that it can still be heard, even when both the other instruments are at full stretch. Meanwhile, within the context of the piano sound, the two instruments can celebrate their differences - the oboe melodic and poignant, the horn warm and noble.
In her repertoire list, Cynthia Carr lists nearly forty compositions. There is a genre here, but it is miniscule compared to the repertoire for a string quartet or even a wind quintet. This is because the oboe/horn/piano trio has never been a standard instrumental combination, never part of a European Court as, for example, the Wind Band octets were. Compositions have come about in a more haphazard way. The nineteenth century was a bad one for wind chamber music players - only Schumann and Brahms among the major composers wrote anything. Where they did, it was for specific players, for example the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld for whom Brahms wrote the Clarinet Quintet. For this Trio there are two keynote nineteenth century pieces - the Herzogenberg Trio already mentioned, and one by Carl Reinecke, written in 1887.
During the 20th Century there were a smattering of works, but the increase in interest didn't come about until late in the century, with the rise of oboe/horn/piano trios in the US, particularly Cynthia Carr's own Trio Arundel, and the horn player Martin Webster of the Hancock Chamber Players. They not only wanted to play music, but were willing to commission pieces, resulting in Paul Basler's jazzy Vocalise-Waltz of 1996 (commissioned by Cynthia) and the Damase Trio mentioned above, commissioned by Martin.
To these people we owe a debt for opening up new possibilities in the under-exploited world of wind chamber music. |
| 21.00 eur Temporarily out of stock |
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ID: PTC5186105
CDs: 1
Type: SACD
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Subcollection: Horn
Multichannel Hybrid SACD - DSD |
| 21.00 eur Buy |
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ID: PTC5186155
CDs: 1
Type: SACD
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Subcollection: Violin
Multichannel Hybrid SACD - DSD |
| 21.00 eur Temporarily out of stock |
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ID: NMCD174
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Horn
1 - 2 Goldberg Ensemble - Malcolm Layfield, conductor
3 - 8 Richard Watkins, horn / Goldberg Ensemble - Malcolm Layfield, conductor
Richard Watkins is at the forefront of promoting contemporary music for the horn. He has given premières of concertos by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Nigel Osborne, Magnus Lindberg, Dominic Muldowney, Nicola LeFanu, and Colin and David Matthews.
The Goldberg Ensemble is committed to performing and commissioning new music, particularly by British composers.
This new recording features a collection of works for string ensemble commissioned by the Goldberg Ensemble including Roger Marsh's haunting Canto 1, based on Dante's Paradiso; Nicola Lefanu's lyrical Amores for horn and string ensemble; Anthony Gilbert's Palace of the Winds inspired by the elaborately ornate Hawa Mahal palace in Jaipur and Geoffrey Poole's Crossing Ohashi Bridge, an abstract work inspired by chaos mathematics such as Fractals, Mandelbrot sets, and named after the Hiroshige painting Sudden shower over Shin-Ôhashi bridge, as featured on the front cover of this disc. |
| 22.00 eur Buy |
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ID: NMCD179
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Saxophone
Rob Keeley was born in Bridgend in 1960. He studied with Oliver Knussen at the Royal College of Music, Magdalen College Oxford under Bernard Rose, and later with Robert Saxton.
As a pianist Keeley has premiered works by, among others, Harrison Birtwistle, Michael Finnissy, Jonathan Cole, Richard Emsley and Nicola Moro.
He is currently Senior Lecturer in Composition at King's College, London.
Keeley's music is jazz tinged with elements of Satie and Poulenc.
Bayan Northcott writes ... Rob Keeley is both a ‘natural’ as a composer, and a bit of an enigma. While his music always unfolds lucidly, often engagingly, it resists easy categorization - at least accordingly to current critical notions. Apparently untouched by avantgarderie, minimalism or post-modern poly-stylistics, it might seem to fall into a traditionalist slot or even be mistaken as academic. Yet his music sounds singularly undriven by theory or the fi ndings of analysis; nor will one so easily discover textbook sonata or fugal procedures in his works. More frequently he generates his forms by flexible refrain-and-chorus procedures, and sometimes, the illusion of traditional thematicism from variable ostinato or change-ringing permutations - suggesting his omnivorous ear has absorbed more ‘advanced’ techniques, from Ligeti, perhaps, or Birtwistle, but in his own way. |
| 22.00 eur Buy |
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