Fanfare 2
*****
Exciting new concertos for supposedly out-of-date instruments

 RUDERS Transfigurations1,4,5. A Movable Concerto2,4,5. Concerto for Harpsichord and Symphony Orchestra3,6,7  1Michala Petri (rcr), 2Peter Navarro-Alonso (org), 3Mahan Esfahani (hpd); 4Kremerata Baltica; 5Andris Veismanis, cond; 6Aarhus SO; 7Leif Segerstam, cond  OUR RECORDINGS 8.226937 (58:58) Reviewed from a WAV download: https://www.ourrecordings.com/albums/transfigurations

Poul Ruders (b. 1949) is a highly regarded Danish composer and organist whose work spans several decades. OUR Recordings is billing this as “three new concertos for three very old instruments,” and it certainly fits the bill, even though the harpsichord concerto is played with an electronically amplified solo instrument. Michala Petri, the recorder virtuosa who also co-owns OUR Recordings, is the soloist on Transfigurations, and on it she flips back and forth between sopranino, soprano, alto, and tenor recorders.
While Ruders’s notes on Transfigurations emphasize transformation—he defines the title as “a figure or character in transit, undergoing several changes en route,” and adds that in music the concept means “a recognizable figure … being hauled through the ‘wringer’ of development”—the piece seems oddly static to me. It’s in two movements, but both are marked Alla breve moderato and the thematic material in each is virtually the same. Only a sudden eruption of bird-like phrases on Petri’s sopranino recorder at 8:14 in the first movement and the agitato fast passage it kicks off, and a similar spark of energy from 0:50 to 2:36 in the second, lead us to a different destination from Ruders’s quietude through most of the rest.
But just because Transfigurations is a bit less “transfigurative” than advertised doesn’t mean it isn’t good. This is first-rate music, ably showcasing Petri and giving her a chance to shine without turning it into a typical Classical or Romantic concerto. Throughout these pieces Ruders proves a fine orchestral technician, able to showcase his soloists without drowning them out. That’s also why he wrote the first two pieces for chamber ensemble rather than full orchestra: so he could put his less-than-loud solo instruments in front of an accompaniment that wouldn’t drown them out.

A Movable Concerto came about as a result of unusual circumstances. Its origins were in a boyhood performance Ruders gave as part of the Copenhagen Boys’ Choir of Handel’s oratorio Saul, during which he sang as one of the altos. But the part of the performance that made the most vivid impression on him wasn’t the oratorio in which he sang. “Rather, it was the organ concerto performed right after the intermission (or was it before?)—following a tradition where Handel himself entertained during performances of his oratorios, sitting at a small, one-keyboard movable organ, a so-called positive.”
Ruders got the commission to write A Movable Concerto from Peter Navarro-Alonso, whom I first encountered while reviewing OUR Recordings’ recent release And I gave my heart … in 49:5. I noted that Navarro-Alonso had little to do on that album other than to supply extended drones and feed the disc’s featured soloist, bass-baritone Jesper Bloch Jespersen, the basic chords. I said, “I’d like to hear more of [Navarro-Alonso] in normal organ repertoire,” and here I got my wish, sort of.
While A Movable Concerto hardly qualifies as “normal organ repertoire,” it does give Navarro-Alonso a stronger and more appropriate showcase for his talents. It also draws on the past in general and Handel in particular without going whole-hog into neo-Classicism (or neo-Baroquism). There are two brief quotes from Handel but none of the deadly-dull recyclings of past banalities that gave many self-proclaimed “neo-Classical” works an off-putting air of self-consciousness. I especially liked the Ivesian interjection of what Ruders calls “Dutch street organ” music culminating at 3:30 of the first movement.

Finally, there is the concerto for harpsichord and full symphony orchestra, recorded here by the person who commissioned it, Mahan Esfahani. Harpsichord concertos were quite common during the instrument’s Baroque-era heyday, but as Ruders points out in his notes, there weren’t many new ones written between the end of the Baroque era and “well into the 20th century.” We can credit their revival to one individual: Wanda Landowska, who after a brief career as a pianist concentrated on harpsichord and commissioned new works for harpsichord and orchestra, including Poulenc’s Concert Champêtre (1928) and Falla’s harpsichord concerto (1926) and El Retablo de Maese Pedro (1923).
Just as Landowska had played these works on a specially constructed harpsichord, larger and louder than the Baroque-era originals, Ruders and Esfahani decided to play the piece on an electrically amplified harpsichord because, as Ruders explained, that opened up “a new world of constellations between harpsichord and orchestra. … Selected purists and period-instrument fundamentalists will be horrified—the mere thought is abominable,” Ruders acknowledged. But as is so often true, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; Ruders’s harpsichord concerto is a three-movement phantasmagoria full of unusual sounds that wouldn’t have been possible without the amplification.

Poul Ruders is an unusual composer whose slow movements draw on his own training as an organist. Often they consist of long, slow drones on which he grafts a solo line. But, as he proves in the final movement of the harpsichord concerto, marked “Vivace Martellato alla breve,” he can also write quite successfully in an agitato vein and generate energy. Whether you’re a long-time Ruders fan or a newbie (like me), you’ll love this disc.