Bolette Roed VIVALDI'S SEASONS

 

VIVALDI'S SEASONS

 

Alpha J.S.BACH Goldberg Variations Recomposed by Peter Navarro-Alonso

These Goldberg Variations present new perspectives on a well-known score. Danish composer Peter Navarro-Alonso's composition is a note-by-note reinvention of the original Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach. Thus Alpha's innovative performance adds no additional notes in comparison to the original. It is merely through the very creative and extreme orchestration that the new composition gains its own life. “The combination of recorder, saxophone and percussion is clearly not very well suited to a baroque-style reorchestration,” claims Peter Navarro-Alonso, responsible for this arrangement tailor made for the members of Alpha. “But the richness in that combination lies in its enormous diversity in timbre and dynamics.” Alpha is a unique Danish ensemble, founded by Bolette Roed, Peter Navarro-Alonso, and David Hildebrandt, who all graduated from the soloist class at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen. As early as 2003, they were the first to explore this instrument combination, attracted by its many possibilities. Alpha was an immediate success, and have been prize-winners at contests and festivals all over Europe.

Bolette Roed J.S. BACH Sonatas - Partitas - Suites

This new Ondine release by Danish-born recorder player Bolette Roed includes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) arranged for solo recorder. The works were arranged by Frans Brüggen (1934–2014), famous Dutch recorder player and conductor who was of the greatest importance to the movement of the historically informed performance practice.

With the exception of his Partita BWV 1013, Bach wrote relatively few works for the recorder. However, composers like Bach and Vivaldi did themselves arrange many of their works for different instruments. From this point of view the work of arranging Bach’s solo cello and violin pieces for recorder is something what Bach himself could have done, had he been inspired by a talented recorder player himself at the time of his compositions. For this recording several different recorders were being chosen. For the 11 movements written for the violin original keys were kept by changing the recorders accordingly. The cello suites are being played by one recorder only by transposing the original keys down a minor second.

Bolette Roed is an award-winning artist who regularly performs with major Danish orchestras as well as with early music ensembles and baroque orchestras in various countries. Bolette Roed strives to extend the instrument’s repertoire beyond its established role in Early Music, towards new frontiers of improvisation, folk, and world music. Roed further aspires to adapt canonical classical works to the recorder and stays in constant dialogue with and commissions new works from today’s composers.

Alpha THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

To reduce a group of works from a variety of different scorings to fit just three specific instrumentalists is a most unusual process: especially in contemporary music, where normally the composer’s original scoring is assumed to be sacrosanct. In these cases, however, the composers have all acquiesced in their treatment, and no wonder! The resulting music reveals the form and richness of each composer’s imagination in a way that is both startling and joyful. It is like comparing a winter woodland to its appearance six months earlier. Gone is the profusion of colour and sensuous abundance, but instead underlying shapes emerge that were concealed before, and a more muted range of colours displays itself, each one intimately compelling in its singularity. Eventually a new sense of richness is created as the mind and the eye – and the ear – adjust themselves to the world about them. What seems at first glance to be only grey and brown begins to show elements of red, and yellow, and blue, and even green.

What further distinguishes this recording is the fact that the performers have had a hand in creating the music, as well as re-creating it. This aspect of music-making plays all too little role in contemporary ‘art’ music, apart from those instances where musicians are asked to improvise – and thus to use a skill that may virtually have atrophied from want of exercise. But improvisation is only one aspect of creative performance, and Alpha’s close encounter with the musical essences of these works seems to have given the trio a precious sense of ownership of the music, even while the works mysteriously and naturally retain their identity with the composers who made them. This idea of music as something ‘open’ – in this case, specific notes and yet open to different instrumentation and therefore different modes of articulation (which in turn open up a cornucopia of possibilities) – is something rare and valuable.

And finally the music: it doesn’t sound to me like new music with that slightly forbidding aura of something that may be good for you, but doesn’t frankly quite grab your attention as you secretly want it to. This music does grab and hold onto you. One must therefore give honour where it’s due: to the composers of course. But I think it also has something to do with the way the performers too have re-imagined it, and in the process invented a new level of meaning for the verb ‘perform’. (Paul Hillier)