Fanfare 1
*****
Brilliant, kaleidoscopic recorder concerto that stuns with unusual combinations of instruments

OLE BUCK Concerto Rosignolo  Michala Petri (rcr); Eivind Gullberg Jensen, cond; Odense SO  OUR RECORDINGS 9.70860 (27:31) Reviewed from a WAV download: https://we.tl/t-6FpPptplOF

Bottom line: this is a work of sheer joy and exuberance. The exhilaration begins with note one and doesn’t let up for the nearly half an hour the work takes to play. The effervescence comes through strongly in Danish composer Ole Buck’s (b. 1945) comments in the liner notes on how Concerto Rosignolo (“Nightingale Concerto”) came to be. “I had long wished to write a concerto for Michala, not just a concerto, but the concerto,” he said. “Many of the pieces I have written for M. over the years have often been, if not inspired by, then certainly influenced by birdsong, not as an attempt to imitate it, but more as an underlying sonic imagination that has colored much of what I have written.”
It seems amazing that a living composer as talented and skilled as Ole Buck should have only two entries in the Fanfare Archive, both dating from the 1980s. One was a review of two LPs (which itself dates this) on the Paula label by Stephen Ellis in 7.5, both of which are compilations of works by contemporary Scandinavian composers. The other is a review of Michala Petri’s first CD for the RCA Red Seal label from 1988 by Jon Tuska in 12:5, also a compilation. It was called The Modern Recorder and was played by the Petri Trio: Michala on recorder, her mother Hanna on harpsichord, and her brother David on cello. Again all the works were by Scandinavian composers except for one “ringer,” a Fantasy for solo recorder by British musician Malcolm Arnold.
I was particularly struck by a comment Ellis made about Buck’s Chamber Music II because it was so totally different from my own reaction to Concerto Rosignolo. “Purposefully random music opens the work—short, episodic, repeated material moves from instrument to instrument, sounding like background music to some artsy animated film and rolling in front of the listener who is supposed to be able (according to the composer) to grasp the change from chaos to the mechanical (and back again?),” Ellis wrote. “I guess I am unable to do what the composer expects a listener to do.”
One of the things I like best about Concerto Rosignolo is precisely what Ellis complained about in Chamber Music II: the rapid changes in instrumental and orchestral colors Buck gives both his players and his listeners. Just when you think you know where this piece is going, Buck upends your expectations. When you think it’s going to be all woodwinds, including lovely counterpoint between Petri’s recorder and the orchestra’s flute section, he’ll throw in some strings. At 1:28 in the first movement and 4:01 in the last Buck inserts stunning passages inspired by gamelan music. The effect reminded me of some of Duke Ellington’s 1930s recordings, which likewise featured surprising and sometimes initially off-putting combinations of instruments.
There’s another commonality between Buck and Ellington. Just as Ellington kept the same musicians in the band for decades and therefore intimately knew what they could and couldn’t do, so Buck and Petri have been collaborating at least since 1981. That year Buck wrote another bird-themed work, Canaries, for the Petri Trio. He followed it up with Gymel in 1983, a work for Michala and Hanna, included on The Modern Recorder. Obviously their almost half-century of working together (Buck affectionately refers to her as “M.” in the liner notes) has given him a thorough working knowledge of her musicianship. It’s also nice that, because it is written largely for wind instruments, Concerto Rosignolo can evoke birdsong more closely than Messiaen’s works, which tried to capture it with as recalcitrant (at least for this purpose) an instrument as the piano.
My one complaint about this issue is I’m not sure about its “Digital EP” format and the less than half an hour of music it offers. I know I’m sounding old-school here, but I grew up consuming music first in the 45-minute length of a standard LP and then in the up to 80 minutes of a CD. I can understand why OUR Recordings issued this piece that way: it enables them to get great music before the public without having to wait for the repertoire (and the funding!) for a full-length release. But, as I said the last time I reviewed a short-format “digital EP” from this label (Helen Grime’s violin concerto in 49:4), when the main course is this good, I want a bigger serving! Mark Gabrish Conlan

Five stars: Brilliant, kaleidoscopic recorder concerto that stuns with unusual combinations of instruments