Paul REALE (b. 1943)
Children’s Palace – Flute Sonata (c.1983) [13:56]
Oboe Sonata (1997) [11:35]
Transfiguration for clarinet and piano (1997) [12:43]
Horn Call for horn and piano (1997) [4:41]
Bassoon Sonata ‘Does Irae’ (1997) [11:33]
Eleven Miniatures for wind quintet
The Borealis Wind Quintet
rec. 2018, Oktaven Audio, Mt Vernon, USA
MSR CLASSICS MS1715 [63:48]
Paul Reale’s music has been given excellent coverage by MSR. This release explores his chamber music for winds and piano via six happily contrasting works. Now in his mid-70s he has no need of schismatic procedures, having long since preferred the pleasures of direct, communicative and warmly textured composition.
Thus it proves in the Flute Sonata – or The Children’s Palace, as it’s entitled. Reale is big on the naming of his pieces, as here, or in the more Latinate appellations he gives to works. This is a sonata of spruce simplicity, a charming Francophile essay in easeful lines cast in two movements. There’s an especially delightful move from a calm limpid opening of the second movement to the giocoso frolic of its happy finale that ends, as one often finds with the composer, with the confidence of quietude. The Oboe Sonata – its finale is called ‘Flea Circus’ so one gets some measure of Reale’s humour and lack of hauteur - combines sinuous lines with many a rhythmic felicity, its songful central movement mining the American Civil War song Aura Lea, better known as the tune to Love Me Tender (which has altogether different words). This eventually turns Jazzy-Baroque, two other elements familiar to Reale admirers.
His Clarinet Sonata is called Transfigurations and it intertwines and weaves material throughout all three movements, the last of which includes a brief fugato with strong Baroque hues in the context of splendidly affirmative music-making. Horn Call for – what else? – horn and piano proves eventful, exciting and full of whooping energy and at less than five minutes in length packs a nice punch.
Reale has used the Dies Irae theme in his works more than once – catch it in his Dies Irae Concerto in a companion MSR disc - and has use for it in the Bassoon Sonata. His writing catches the solo instrument’s more insouciant qualities and well as its propensity for droll voicings in the variations of the finale. As ever with Reale, characterisation is spot-on. The one piece for wind quintet is the Eleven Miniatures, a larky sequence of Parisian hi-jinks all over in nine minutes through not before leaving us with a Stravinsky quotation to see us on our way (from The Rite). It amplifies Reale’s gift for expression and witty turns of phrase. It also sounds like it’s great fun to play as it is, indeed, to hear.
The players of the Borealis Wind Quintet, singly or collectively, and hardworking pianist Christopher Guzman play with spirit and finesse. There’s plenty to enjoy in this whimsical, and sometimes beguiling selection.
Jonathan Woolf
