Recordings

Carl Nielsen: Music for Wind and Piano

Quintet for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Horn and Bassoon Op 43 (1922)
Serenata in vano for Clarinet, Horn, Bassoon, Cello and Double Bass (1914)
Fantasy in G minor for Clarinet and Piano (c 1881)
Fantasy Pieces for Oboe and Piano Op 2 (1889)
Canto Serioso for Horn and Piano (1913)
The Fog is Lifting for Flute and Piano Op 41 No 1 (1920)
The Children are Playing for Flute solo Op 41 No 2 (1920)
Three Piano Pieces Op 59 (1927-28)
Allgretto for Two Recorders (1931)

with
Michael Dussek - Piano
Pierre Doumenge - Cello
Leon Bosch - Double Bass
Helen Hooker and Sophie Middleditch - Recorders

Meridian CD CDE 84580

nlce oboist Melanie Ragge sheds some light on the making of this CD:

No sooner had the plane touched down from a fabulous trip to Italy working with Angela Hewitt at the Trasimeno Music Festival, than rehearsals began to complete our Nielsen CD. Working with the ever good-humoured and fabulously patient Richard Hughes and Susanne Stanzeleit, we found ourselves again in Meridian’s renowned “Natural Sound” recording venue. This little church is famous amongst performers not only for its excellent natural acoustic, but also for being under a Heathrow flight path! The CD includes Nielsen’s works for winds and piano which we were delighted to be recording with guest pianist Michael Dussek (Fantasy for clarinet and piano, Fantasy Pieces for oboe and piano, Canto Serioso for horn and piano, two miniatures for flute The Fog is Lifting and The Children are Playing for flute solo). Mike also recorded three beautiful works for solo piano (the Three Pieces Op 59); and, of course, the recording includes that centrepiece of the Quintet repertoire – the Op 43 Wind Quintet. Just to add a bit of spice to the project, in the gap between our first and second recording sessions for this CD, Nielsen’s publishers – Hansen Edition in Denmark – produced their exhaustive new edition of Nielsen’s works. So, we had it couriered over specially for the recording and it arrived just in the nick of time to record the Quintet. This beautiful hardback volume includes pages and pages of editorial notes and revealed plentiful anomalies between manuscripts, autographs and current printed editions, all of which were greeted with eager pencils ready to annotate performance parts. Lively discussions ensued as to which alterations to include in the recording; even the very first note in the clarinet part of the Quintet was up for debate! It was official – the nlce had become ‘Nielsen Nerds’. Eventually we couldn’t resist doing a few takes of versions that had existed in Nielsen’s earlier sketches – rapidly nicknamed ‘the nerdy takes’. Maybe we should we re-title the CD Nielsen for Nerds?! So excited were we by our newly discovered passion for authenticity (well …… ‘nerdiness’) that we are now offering a Nielsen lecture recital entitled “Why bother with manuscripts?!”; as the publicity material states, “in an informal lecture recital, the nlce’s combination of good-humoured pedantry and practicality is designed to illustrate to music students the joys and necessities of looking at source material, as they themselves did to inform their recent recording of these works.

To view further information on the new Carl Nielsen Edition of the Wind Quintet click here

Cabinet of Curiosities: Wind and Piano Chamber Music

A Book of Studies Set 1 for Wind Quintet (1993)
A Cabinet of Curiosities for Piano, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon and Horn (1993)
A Book of Studies Set 2 for Wind Quintet (1993-94)
Darker Still for Flute and Piano (2001)
A Book of Studies Set 3 for Wind Quintet (written for the nlce in 2003)

“The New London Chamber Ensemble sounds utterly at home in Woolrich’s music, shaping lines and phrases with such ease and comfort that at all times the musical surface is a thing of great beauty”…. International Record Review May 2007

The chamber music of the internationally-respected composer, John Woolrich, is both intense and private. As fellow composer and writer, Robin Holloway, has noted, “his music whispers, whirs, rustles, creaks, and shines with a gentle light, often elegiacal”. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his works for wind instruments and piano, played sensitively and passionately in this recording by the New London Chamber Ensemble with the accomplished pianist Julian Jacobson. This CD, originally conceived as a celebration of Woolrich’s 50th Birthday, also includes previously unrecorded works written especially for the New London Chamber Ensemble.

Visit Meridian Records for further details.

Other recent reviews
“Woolrich’s trademark microscopic forms again beguile the ear” Gramophone August 2007

“Woolrich’s individual voice and the unerring craftsmanship with which he constructs and scores each item bind these epigrammatic movements into a cohesive whole.”
“Woolrich also knows how to pull out the stops. When he calls for something more raucous the NLCE responds with a power that belies its small forces.” BBC Music Magazine ‘Proms’ issue 2007