Gramophone
ONE TO WATCH
Jonas Frølund Clarinet
This month's young artist is Danish clarinetist, Jonas Frølund. Bom in 1996, he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and the Paris Conservatoire, graduating from the latter last year.
His repertoire ranges from the late 1700s up to the present, embracing solo work, chamber music, concertos and improvisation, these different areas reflected in positions including principal clarinet of The Danish Chamber Orchestra, co-founder of Copenhagen-based wind quintet V Coloris, and playing with the folk music trio Stundom, as well as with accordionist Bjarke Mogensen in Duo Omni.
Frølund can already be heard on record playing chamber music by Poul Ruders, released last year on OUR Recordings, and also on an album of music by Danish composer Mette Nielsen on Dacapo. But his new album 'Solo Alone and More', issued by OUR Recordings in August, will be the most significant portrait yet of this young virtuoso.
The programme works its way through the clarinet family from treble to bass, while -with the single exception of the cor anglaise solo from the prelude to Act 3 of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, here recorded for the first time on bass clarinet - all the works are drawn from the century since the end of the First World War, including works by Carl Nielsen, Stravinsky, Bent Sørensen, Mette Nielsen, Messiaen, Gunnar Berg, Ruders and Simon Steen-Andersen.
Meanwhile, the sheer breadth of his music-making, its versatility and personality, can be enjoyed on a range of YouTube videos, from Steen-Andersen's De Profundis and other works on the new album to a gloriously zany multiple-part rendition of “Jingle Bells”. lnventive and exploratory, we hugely look forward to discovering the shape - or shapes - that this impressive musicians's career will take. July 15th Gramophone August Issue – Martin Cullingford