Is there a living composer from the Nordic countries who better combines puckish humour with such stringent discipline? The first two works on this album serve as a joyous reminder of just what Poul Ruders is capable of when he has a twinkle in his eye. Transfigurations is subtitled ‘a double portrait for recorder solo and string orchestra’, and the composer’s superior touch is evident right from the way the opening string chords are voiced. This is a work of patience and clarity, so very Danish in its tight form and organisation: the birthing of both movements from the same gesture; the working through a scheme of recorder types and back again. Ruders finds a particular sonority in his thick, low-tessitura string-writing and whether or not by design, Kremerata Baltica deliver a very distinct sound for him just as the work’s dedicatee Michala Petri brings her sensitivity and experience to the solo lines.
A Movable Concerto brings to mind the work with which Ruders first endeared himself to the UK, his 1995 Proms commission Concerto in Pieces. The new work is subtitled ‘Five Short Pieces for Positive Organ’ and plays with Handel much like its predecessor does Purcell, albeit it a little less obviously, with most references to the composer’s organ concertos at least partially buried. But the humour is still there, as is the sense of Ruders’s delight in the musical mechanics, particularly its first-movement Alla breve. The Largo is touching but not sentimental, the Animato has the diligent hyperactivity Ruders does like nobody else, the Vivace shows his love for interlocking patterns and the Andante his playfulness again, as it emerges as if from muddy puddles and returns to frolic in them, all features relished by organist Peter Navarro-Alonso. You hear exactly the same sort of humour in the music as you read in Ruders’s booklet notes,but crafted with the utmost seriousness.
I was less enamoured with Ruders’s Concerto for harpsichord and symphony orchestra. The composer uses amplification to bolster the harpsichord (‘yes, an abomination!’ he grins in the notes) and again there is a strong Classical element to texture and footprint. But the work seems ponderous and heavy-going to my ears, missing the thematic flair, quicksilver invention and sense of structural fun heard on the rest of the album and in so much else by this composer. Andrew Mello, October 2026