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ARCO BALENO - Conversations - music for chamber ensemble   Arco Baleno PKP PRODUCTIES PKP014 [71.47]

This disc can be ordered from Arco Baleno at arco.baleno@ping.be. UK sterling price - 12GBP


 

ROUSSEL Elpénor - Poème Radiophonique
MOZART
Flute Quartet in D Kv 285
BOUDEWIJN BUCKINX
AB
JOSEPH JONGEN
Sérénade Tendre
JAN HUYLEBROECK
Mégané
ARTHUR BLISS
Conversations

Arco Baleno is an ensemble of six responsive and sensitive players comprising string quartet plus flute and oboe. This is a very varied recital (fruitily recorded) and one that amply justifies Belgian Radio 3 and KBC's confidence in these young players. The Mozart is the piece most likely to be known in other performances. It is given with aptly bubbly joie de vivre. However this disc is unlikely to be bought for this reason. The other works are much rarer.

The Roussel is restive and dashingly tuneful blending Ravel and the chamber music of Herbert Howells (piano quartet). It is not a work likely to be well known. The drowsy-eyed lent is done with wondering poise and the cuckoo figure keeps the movement floatingly airborne. A superb movement followed by a miniature gem of a Tres Animé finale ending with a typically Mozartian flourish. The Buckinx's haunted atmosphere steps out of the same family as the Roussel. The title is taken from the title initials of the performing group.

Jongen's Serenade (one of several written in Bournemouth during WW1) is a break from dizzy sensuality. This music (often hustling and bustling) is a degree or two drier than the Roussel having cleaner more classic lines. The Huylebroeck is also dry but not desiccated and by no means immune to flights of sensual display as in the closing bars of the Toccata. The middle Koraal is a connoisseur's fantasy of imaginative power. The final Rondo's pizzicato strings and hurtling flute seem distinctly jazzy while having poetic depth.

The five Bliss Conversations take in the jabbering chatter of a meeting and the meeting of two lovers deep in a wood pictures with the lovers disaffected and suspicious. In a ball room is typically galant at first but soon the lights dim and things turn cold before returning to the slightly vapid popular dance music of the time (1920). The solo Cor Anglais Soliloquy is Bliss close to the British pastoral school (as in Seven American Poems - now when will someone record those?) contrasted with a central dance section. The final In The Tube at Oxford Circus might well be seen as a chamber counterpart of Honegger's Pacific 231 although it finds in lyrical tenderness; finally it returns to train music and accents that sound Rumanian or Hungarian.

Recommended.

Reviewer

Rob Barnett

This disc can be ordered from Arco Baleno at arco.baleno@ping.be. UK sterling price - 12GBP

fax Belgium - 050 393861

Reviewer

Rob Barnett


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