*****
A charming new concerto superbly played by a legendary musician.

 OLE BUCK Concerto Rosignolo ● Michala Petri (rec); Eivind Gullberg Jensen, cond; Odense SO ● OUR RECORDINGS 9.70860 (27:33) Reviewed from a WAV download: 48 kHz/24-bit
Here is something genuinely fresh. Ole Buck’s Concerto Rosignolo is a recorder concerto that takes its cue not from the instrument’s long association with Baroque formality but from something far older and more elemental: the song of the nightingale. The result is a work of disarming openness, melodic, warmly scored, alive with color, that feels as though it has arrived from an entirely different corner of new music than the one most of us habitually frequent.
Buck, born in 1945, was among the Danish composers who turned decisively away from post-serial density in the late 1960s, helping to forge what became known as the New Simplicity. His music has always prized economy and directness, spare textures, uncluttered lines, a trust in the expressive power of a single well-placed interval, and Concerto Rosignolo is entirely of a piece with that lifelong aesthetic, even as it ventures into territory that feels distinctly personal. Michala Petri, for whom the work was written, scarcely needs introduction: she has done more than any living musician to establish the recorder as a serious concert instrument, commissioning over 150 new works and recording more than eighty albums across a career stretching back to her childhood debut in the 1960s. That Buck describes this concerto as not merely a concerto for Petri but “the concerto for Michala” tells you something about the depth of the creative connection at work here.
The concerto unfolds in five movements across a generous half-hour, and its governing principle is one of organic growth rather than architectural imposition. Buck’s own account of the compositional process is wonderfully candid: after writing a long orchestral introduction without knowing quite where it would lead, he felt as though a nightingale had landed on his desk and begun guiding his hand. The image is whimsical, but it accurately captures the music’s quality of spontaneous unfolding. Short melodic cells, birdlike in their darting energy, gather and multiply through the ensemble, with the recorder threading its way through the orchestral fabric rather than standing apart from it. There is a passage where Buck allows everything to fall still before permitting sudden eruptions of sound, and another where a trumpet enters to echo the recorder’s line, becoming an unexpected bridge to the next section. The formal logic is one of impulse and response, each movement flowing into the next as answer follows question.
Petri plays it, of course, with that combination of agility, tonal warmth, and sheer musical generosity that has defined her art for decades. The recorder can be a limited voice in the wrong hands; in hers it becomes an instrument of remarkable nuance, and Buck’s writing, which asks her to move between several sizes of recorder, gives her every opportunity to demonstrate its range. The Odense Symphony Orchestra under Eivind Gullberg Jensen provide attentive, richly colored support, and the live recording from the Carl Nielsen Hall has been captured with impressive clarity and presence. I found this hugely enjoyable: Buck’s singular artistic vision, a world in which melody, nature, and a kind of quiet reflective gravity coexist without the slightest friction, is perfectly matched by Petri’s abundant musicianship. Dominic Hartley, Fanfare April 1th