If you have read many
of my reviews you know I like to compare
one recording or one piece of music
with another. This recording has been
utterly perplexing to me for some time
because I couldn’t find anything at
all to compare it with. DeRoos is a
recorder virtuoso of such rarified attainment
that he not only produces only the sweetest,
most consonant, sounds, but is further
able to use the notorious pitch instability
of the "nose flute" to expressive
advantage. He is more than a mere Heifetz
of the recorder, he is a Mischa Elman
of the recorder. Considering his ability
to inspire these other musicians to
play along with him in his style, he
is a Stokowski of the recorder.
In the Sammartini concerto we encounter
the more or less conventional sound
of a soloist and Baroque (one-to-a-part)
orchestra, but what passion! From a
recorder! But this is no ordinary recorder,
this is a shakuhachi recorder!
Where did he find all
these jigs, rounds, and chaconies, with
titles like Johney Cock thy Beavor
and Slow Ayre, Jig and Bore;
all of them either anonymous or by people
we’ve mostly never heard of before?
And where did they
find all those synonyms so that they
could write seven pages of notes and
never use the word "recorder"
once?
We’ve all heard some
awful recorder playing in our time,
but here there are no shrillness, squeaking,
inappropriate jumps in volume or breathlessness
on the part of the performer which can
have the effect of making the listener
feel short of breath out of empathy.
Just the sweetest possible singing tone.
Many of these pieces
sound very familiar, some because we
have heard them before, others because
they are in a folk-tune style that makes
them instantly welcome, instantly old
friends. Delightful is the word!
This disk (which is
manufactured by Austrian Sony) will
not play at all in my Sony DDU 1621
computer CDROM drive, but plays fine
in my other Sony drives and players,
including my Emerson HD7088 portable
which is now and again just a little
touchy.
Paul Shoemaker