Fanfare 5 *****

Fascinatingly varied concertos by Poul Ruders compellingly performed.

 RUDERS Transfigurations1. A Movable Concerto2. Harpsichord Concerto3 ● 1Michala Petri (rcr); 2Peter Navarro-Alonso (org); 3Mahan Esfahani (hpd); 1,2Andris Veismanis, 3Leif Segerstam, cond; 1,2Kremerata Baltica; 3Aarhus SO ● OUR RECORDINGS 8.226937 (59:01) 3Live: Aarhus 09/10/2020 Reviewed from a WAV download: 44.1 kHz/16-bit

How does a modern composer engage with instruments weighted with history? Poul Ruders provides three answers on this compelling disc. The clearest statement comes in his note to the Concerto for Harpsichord and Symphony Orchestra of 2019, where he reaches for an image from architecture: old churches, factories and warehouses given a new purpose by being fitted out with contemporary ideas rather than preserved under glass. The harpsichord, he points out, is normally treated as an instrument stranded in its own century. His response is not to write around its limitations but to cancel them. The instrument is amplified, which opens up combinations with a full symphony orchestra that would otherwise be impossible. He knows this will offend some listeners, and says so with some relish. And yet once they’ve listened any sense of outrage will, I suspect, be gone: the balance now achieved between solo instrument and orchestra is perfectly judged and surely what Ruders foresaw.
Mahan Esfahani gave the premiere in Aarhus in September 2020, and it is that performance we hear. The movements run fast, slow, and then a finale Ruders coyly declines to characterize in advance, “just you wait.” It turns out to be marked Vivace martellato alla breve. That’s a tricky combination, but Esfahani’s virtuosic rendering of the two-beat hammered meter justifies Ruders’s building of our anticipation in his note. All in all, it’s an exciting motoric tracing of an endlessly fascinating conversation, excitable, sparky, with Esfahani the energetic soloist who has all the answers.
A Movable Concerto of 2023 answers the same question the opposite way. Written for Peter Navarro-Alonso, organist at Vor Frelsers Kirke in Copenhagen, it takes the small movable chamber organ that Handel used to play between the halves of his own oratorios and writes music that leans into the association rather than resisting it. The first of its five short movements contains doctored quotations from Handel’s concertos; elsewhere there is a passage the composer assures us is meant to sound like a Dutch street organ, and is not the librarian’s mistake. The whole runs under twenty minutes and claims to be nothing grander than entertaining. I’m here to tell you this is pastiche as high art and it succeeds triumphantly thanks to Peter Navarro-Alonso’s beautifully calibrated playing and, once more, to Ruders’s ear for balance.
Transfigurations, which opens the disc, declines the question altogether. The composer’s note says nothing whatever about the recorder’s history. It is about a theme in transit, and about a relay of instruments, tenor to soprano to alto to sopranino and back. Two movements begin with nearly identical bars and then go different ways. Ruders insists it is not a virtuoso vehicle, while conceding that the soloist is hardly inconspicuous. And this is Michala Petri, who commissioned the work herself and knew what she was doing. Her playing is riveting, articulate, literally breathing a vitality and spirit into the music on the page. The commission has repaid her handsomely.
Three varied and rewarding works, then. The recorder and organ works were taped together in Lithuania in December 2025, while the harpsichord concerto is a live Aarhus tape from five years earlier. The acoustic in the latter is understandably slightly different, but as with the studio captures the recorded sound is excellent. And there is another reason to be glad the harpsichord concerto is here. Leif Segerstam, who conducts it, died in October 2024. Danacord has already issued four discs of his Aarhus recordings, Beethoven, Bruckner, Smetana, Langgaard. That set is an outstanding memorial of canonical repertoire. This concerto is the one contemporary thing standing outside it and I’m so glad we’re now able to hear it.
This is an impressive disc by any measure. Ruders has been fortunate in his performers throughout, three soloists of the first rank, as well as the orchestras that meet them, and the result is a variegated combustibility that is never less than stimulating and frequently thrilling. Dominic Hartley, August 10th 2026