Fanfare 3

*****
A terrific piece by a composer who should be far better known outside of his natural environment
Fanfare 3 È BUCK Concerto Rosignolo. Michala Petri (recs); Eivind Gullberg Jensen, cond; Odense SO OUR RECORDINGS 9.70860 (27:33) reviewed from WAV files, 48 KHz, 24-bit
Later on in this issue, you will find my review of another OUR disc, centering on the much-missed conductor and composer Ole Schmidt. Here’s another Ole, now of the Buck variety (born 1945), who has appeared a couple of times previously in Fanfare: his Hyperion for string quartet and his Chamber Music II for wind quintet, string quartet, and double-bass (both at once, two very different pieces, in a review by Stephen Ellis way back in 07:5, so 1984) and secondly via the piece Gymel on an RCA Red Seal disc, The Modern Recorder, featuring (as here) Michala Petri in 12:5 (1989). Quite a long absence, then.
There is further listening to be had, too: I love the timbral imagination, and occasional humor, surely, of Landscapes No. 1, Summer on a disc comprising Buck’s Landscapes (Landskaber in Danish) performed by the Danish Chamber Players and Svend Aaquist Johansen on Dacapo: basically, Buck’s Four Seasons!. Small wonder I like his music: Buck studied with two of my most admired composers, Per Nørgaard and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen. Try, also, the crystalline purity of A Tree (another Dacapo all-Buck disc, now with the Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen under Jesper Nordin). Oh, and finally (and a bit tongue-in-cheek), don’t confuse Ole Buck with Ole Bull, a Norwegian violin-playing folklorist memorably described by Andrew Mellor in his book The Nordic Silence as “The André Rieu of the 19th-Century”.
If I use the word “minimalist,” it is apt to be misconstrued, even if I de-capitalize the term. Buck’s music is minimal in means, often based on just a few notes; some passages might be heard as post-Minimalist though (the closing moments of A Tree, for example).
Moving now to the present piece and the present digital-only release, the Concerto Rosignolo of 2022. Linking a nightingale to the recorder is not a new idea; however, this is a nightingale with ambition. Buck wanted to write not just a concerto for Michala Patri, but, in his own words, the concerto. Buck saw himself, after composing the work’s introduction, as gradually transforming into a nightingale, and letting himself be “swept along” by “the many new ideas that presented themselves”. As he puts it, “I had the feeling that the music was writing itself, with a nightingale perched on my desk, nodding in satisfaction”. He also says that “coincidence became the determining force of form” Melodies converge and blend in here, while there is perhaps a small Rückblick to Landscapes in the idea of Spring breaking in. Buck quotes Mahler (I assume, as the quote is not credited) in stressing the importance of sounds “Wie ein Naturlaut,” part of that composer’s First Symphony opening).
The opening solo line, that introduction referred to above, is rich and mellow, like a Nordic shakuhachi. Higher avian gestures seem to invite in more and more instrumentalists: flute is an inevitability; a single-note trumpet less so (I wonder if there is a link to that instrument’s similarly pithy contributions and cheeky dialogues with the soloist to the second movement?). And yet, everything fits. Modernist birds, but not of the Messiaen variety, nor of the Esa-Pekka Salonen imagined/artificial variety, either (the Piano Concerto). The recorder parts seem endless, and Petri is unsurprisingly not only undeterred, but faultless. Eivind Gullberg Jensen, artistic and general director of the Bergen National Opera and chief conductor of the Noord Nederlands Orkest, is with Petri every step of the way, either in interaction or sonic halo. The scherzo-like second movement necessitates this sort of dynamic communication between soloist and orchestra, a playful yet dissonant conversation that, around 1”30 in, starts to exhibit shades of darkness.
Buck uses the different timbres of different recorders to superb effect, not least in the lower reaches that open the third movement. The pointillist aspect of this movement offers another side of Buck; pointillism with humor, including a cuckoo and glowering, closely scored low chords from the orchestra that may or may not constitute a threat to our avian heroine. The opening of the fourth movement is played on sopranino recorder: it is piccolo-high, supported by appropriately silvery scoring.
The accumulation of birds in the fourth movement is remarkable, as is Petri’s accompanied cadenza. Her technique is as perfect as it is indefatigable. That cadenza segues into the slightly richer sounds of the fifth and final movement. Here, we come closest to Minimalism in the “traditional” sense, as motifs swirl around the sound space. Buck’s ability to shift from one segment of a movement to the other and to leave the listener wondering how he did it is particularly noticeable here, while the composer’s idea of a “composed silence” at the end, a sort of pulsation in the orchestra against which tenor recorder and trombone dialogue, is as effective as it is conceptually fascinating.
A terrific piece by a composer who should be far better known outside of his natural environment. As so often with OUR Recordings, I cannot fault the standard of recording.
There is a YouTube film of this concerto by these forces, it’s a lot of fun to watch, but somehow I prefer the audio-only experience as it allows full concentration on Buck’s fascinating processes. Colin Clarke