Few painters are as enigmatic as Johannes Vermeer. His works command admiration for their meticulous observation and the sensitive rendering of light and colour.

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The album also contains additional tracks by Francois Couperin that are identified by generic Baroque era dance titles without specific details: Allemande, Sarabande, Sicilenne, Gavotte.

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Anglo-German composer Sherwood (b.1866) has slipped through the cracks of history—his impressive output of orchestral, chamber, choral and instrumental music is only now beginning to be discovered. Once an important figure in his native Dresden, in WWI he faded from view and by the time of his death in London (1939) his music was as good as forgotten.

REVIEW:

Percy Sherwood (1866–1939)—who is he? Well, Toccata is starting a Sherwood collection, and the liner notes give us much detail complete with some fine illustrations and footnotes. Sherwood was English but was born and grew up in Germany, moving to London during WW II. He was well thought of in both countries.

This program of his cello music reveals a romantic composer of verve and originality, lively to listen to and by no means boring. Spooner and Norris play him with passion and accuracy. There are two fine sonatas from 1891 and 1900 and three pieces, Op. 14 of considerable originality. The early set of Little Pieces is less unusual, but quite lovely. This is a composer worth following up, certainly when played as well as he is here.

-- American Record Guide

This album is an all-too-rare recording of Mozart's Gran Partita in a contemporary arrangement for fortepiano, oboe and string trio. The arrangement, made by Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke, is a pure masterpiece for it's sonic effectiveness and for it's successful coherence in representing Mozart's ideas. Ewald Demeyere has taken part in many recordings and is principally interested in the influence of theories from the Baroque era and performing on period instruments.

The ensemble London Winds, praised by BBC Music for its ‘technical accomplishment, expressive commitment and warmth of timbre’, presents in this recording great twentieth-century works for winds.

It features music by Hindemith, Nielsen, and Janácek, and, from the next generation, Barber and Ligeti. Although not equally prolific (Kleine Kammermusik is Hindemith’s single contribution to that genre while winds are generally more prominent in Nielsen’s music), all these composers brought the wind repertoire back to prominence, after a quiet period of more than a century. The music is full of playfulness and European folk colours.

A stunning combination of virtuoso players who also enjoy active solo careers, the ensemble London Winds is renowned for its technical brilliance, interpretative vision, and joie de vivre. Founded in 1988 by the British clarinettist Michael Collins, the group rapidly became one of the world’s most prominent chamber ensembles.

Review:

There's plenty of personality in the playing here, with much wit in the Allegro ben moderato and the charming minuet. London Winds deliver an exuberant account, surpassing my previous favorite, the Michael Thompson Wind Quintet.

– Gramophone

A fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.

It’s very unusual to find all Honegger’s Violin Sonatas — which includes the solo sonata of 1940 — grouped together in one disc. In fact I’m not aware of another such coupling in the current catalogue, which gives this budget price entrant cachet. Even better, the performances are persuasive and finely played and recorded.
 
This would amount to a recommendation even were the music not so attractive, which is not to say it’s transparent, as there are moments of occlusion and introspection along the way. The First Sonata is actually the unnumbered D minor of 1912. I agree wholly with Anyssa Neumann’s booklet notes that the opening embeds genuine ‘pathos’—it’s the pathos of popular song, in my view, to which Laurence Kayaleh responds with pervasive and elegant portamenti and effusive lyric intensity. There’s a degree of agitato in this work and Brahmsian striving, and it’s understandable that it was not published during Honegger’s lifetime in a sense, given the influences. But it’s still a big, confident utterance from the young composer. The slow movement is engagingly done, with its odd Delian moments, and the March section is well characterised. The confident and puckish finale is interrupted by a moment of baroque reportage, before a nobly conceived maestoso sweeps us to the finish. As she does throughout, Kayaleh plays with a refined tonal palette. She doesn’t make a big sound, but it is finely coloured.
 
The first numbered sonata was written during the last two years of the First World War. It’s a more focused work, less effusive, and sites the fast movement centrally between two essentially slow ones. The central panel of the Presto is played with the mute, and the whole thing is freely ruminative, though I detect Franck still in his musical handwriting. Stark intoning begins the finale, and here Kayaleh powerfully intensifies her vibrato width. It’s hard not to read into this movement something of the same spirit, but not the same means, that informs John Ireland’s contemporaneous Second Violin Sonata.
 
By contrast the 1919 Second Sonata has rather dreamlike qualities. It takes in a fugal moment, whilst remaining strongly chromatic, indeed compact in its reach — it’s 12 minutes in length in this performance. The finale’s ebullience removes the rather heavy atmosphere brilliantly, fully conveyed by Kayaleh and Paul Stewart. The solo sonata is becoming ever more popular and this performance will not harm that status in any way. What I like especially is the generosity of her grazioso phrasing in the Allegretto; delightfully done.
 
So if you lack these sonatas, or are curious about Honegger’s approach to them, this disc will stand as a fine guide with performances as subtle as they are perceptive.
 
-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International  

Colorful, original, whimsical, and adventuresome, this collection of musical short stories from one of America’s most diverse composers has something to please every ear.



SCHICKELE A Year in the Catskills. Gardens 1. What Did You Do Today at Jeffrey’s House 2. Dream Dances 3. Diversions • Blair Wind Qnt members; 1,2 Melissa Rose (pn); 3 Felix Wang (vc) • NAXOS 8.559687 (52:03)


The Blair Wind Quintet is a faculty ensemble of the Blair School of Music of Vanderbilt University. Though a woodwind player myself, I am not familiar with their work, so this release, the second on which this ensemble appears, is a pleasant introduction to these fine musicians. Their performances here are mostly solo and in smaller groupings, with only the title work, A Year in the Catskills, played by the whole quintet. This last is one of a trio of works for resident ensembles funded by the Blair Commissioning Project. Peter Schickele’s quintet was joined by a piano trio from Susan Botti and a string quartet by György Kurtág; one can but imagine what a wildly incongruent faculty recital that could have made.


Schickele is, of course, best known in his persona of the researcher and exhumer of works by “the youngest and oddest of J. S. Bach’s 20-odd children.” Since 1965, the year of his first public concert, he has created a body of entertaining musical parodies of familiar musical forms for his fictional P. D. Q. Bach. There is another aspect of the composer, though, as many will know. Under his own name, he composes concert works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, and vocalists, as well as scores for film, theater, and television. This disc presents a nice sampling of pieces for wind instruments, written over a 46-year period. They cross boundaries of genre and style with consummate skill, and are uniformly clever, lightweight, and charming. Even when fleetingly serious, they are never more than melancholy. They are more often humorous. In fact, minus the more obvious burlesquing that goes on in a P. D. Q. Bach pastiche, his serious works sound remarkably akin to his comedic bread and butter. The unexpected instrumental colors are a bit more subdued, the odd cadence more integrated, and the stylistic incongruities less outrageous. What is played for laughs when acting The Professor is quirky and playful in the realm of the serious composer, but the singular identity can never be in question.


Consider the four seasonal portraits of A Year in the Catskills (2009), presented in Baroque canons and a fantasy, and rounded out with a fifth movement called “Fast Driving,” which bebops the listener back to more modern urban surroundings. Or What Did You Do Today at Jeffrey’s House? (1988) for horn and piano, which remembers childhood games (one is relieved to learn, given his compositional credits for O! Calcutta! ) with a piano-stride parade and a boogie-woogie carnival with dancing bears framing a very brief compulsory nap. Finally, there is Dream Dances (1988), a suite for flute, oboe, and cello, which juxtaposes a not very Baroque minuet and sarabande with a jitterbug, a demented French gallop, and a waltz that only needs John Ferrante and some silly lyrics to become one of the Diverse Ayres on Sundrie Notions.


The two remaining earlier works give some idea of where Schickele might have headed if the fictional “minimeister of Wein-am-Rhein” had not been such a huge success. In these we hear a composer still working in academia, creating works that reflect seriously (well, all right, more seriously) on relatively contemporary styles. Gardens (1968) for oboe and piano is an atmospheric triptych with overtones of Messiaen, though this is more obvious in New York Philharmonic oboist Joseph Robinson’s recording on Cala. Diversions (1963) for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon channels neoclassical Stravinsky in portraits of the bath, a game of billiards, and a New York bar. It is all very engaging, and wonderfully presented by musicians and engineers. Naxos has a winner here, and I hope we hear more from the Blair Wind Quintet. Meanwhile, woodwind fanciers are hereby alerted to a must-buy release.


FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames


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It is a good and joyful thing to see a nice collection of Peter Schickele’s concert music. Not that he is unduly famous for his P.D.Q. Bach character, but as a composer of serious music he shines as one of the most original voices of his generation. Schickele has not invented a new wheel, rather he has managed to take traditional musical gestures and season them with his own invention with the skill of a master chef. This collection of chamber music, deftly rendered by members of the faculty of Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music, is a showcase of the composer’s unique wit and creativity.

Commissioned by the Blair Quintet, A Year in the Catskills was brand new at the time of this recording. It is a picturesque work; full of the kind of interesting twists of melody that make Schickele’s music so fascinating. He is prone to shifting one or two notes in a tune by a semitone here or a semitone there to make what could sound quite ordinary into something that is unique and quirky.

The brief triptych Gardens, for oboe and piano is a study in colors. One of Schickele’s outstanding features is his ability to say so much in a very short time. I wouldn’t call him a miniaturist, but he can get his point across with little fuss. Such are these elegant little pieces that depict a garden at the three parts of the day. Jared Hauser plays with a sweet unforced tone, and is sensitively accompanied by pianist Melissa Rose.

What Did You Do Today at Jeffrey’s House? is a bit of nostalgia based on memories of the composer’s playtime with a childhood friend. These are whimsical pieces, pulling from a number of styles including a rollicking boogie-woogie ending. Scored for horn and piano, Leslie Norton and Melissa Rose find all the charm of these brief episodes. I can’t say that I was completely in love with the pieces themselves, as they came across to these ears as a bit contrived.

The outstanding work in this recital is the lovely set of Dream Dances. Scored for flute, oboe and cello, Schickele combines the old and the new by creating a suite that is reminiscent of a Baroque partita, but just for fun he throws in the semi-modern by replacing the Courrant with a Jitterbug and the Allemande with a Waltz. It is pretty much genius really, and Jane Kirschner, Jared Hauser and Felix Wang deliver an elegant performance full of wit.

Diversions, scored for oboe, clarinet and bassoon are again whimsical, and depict three specific scenes, a hot bath, a billiard game, and a New York bar. Although I felt that the composer captured his scenes well, I can’t say that I was particularly moved by these little snapshots, in spite of their being very well played.

Peter Schickele is reported to be one of the most performed composers in America, and it is easy to see why. The term accessible gets too much airplay, but his music is almost always captivating, mainly due to his double ability to color within the lines while choosing shades that don’t come from just any box of crayons. A good listen.

Colorful, original, whimsical, and adventuresome, this collection of musical short stories from one of America’s most diverse composers has something to please every ear.


-- Kevin Sutton, MusicWeb International

British music for the clarinet was hugely indebted to the elite interpreters who inspired this important repertoire. they included Frederick Thurston, who first performed three of the works on this recording. Sir Arnold Bax's sonata, much admired and imbued with Celtic folklore, is heard in a version that restores the manuscript's original phrasing. the pieces by roger Fiske and Iain Hamilton are heard in Premie. re-recordings, while Richard Rodney Bennett's duo Concertante was commissioned by the eminent soloist in this recital, Nicholas Cox.

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Rivka Golani’s portrait album invites listeners on a musical journey spanning the 1820s to the late 1940s; its style ranges from early romanticism to post romanticism. Another of the music peculiarities is that it shows how the millennial heritage of Jewish culture enriched European art music. Rivka Golani is recognized as one of the outstanding modern violists. More than 300 works have so far been composed for her, including 77 concertos: a record matched by no other violist in history.

Petr Eben is considered to be one of the Czech Republic's leading contemporary composers. His organ compositions explore new territory in regard to playing techniques, sound and subject matter. His goal is to convey a message to listeners, through commentaries or - as in his Second Organ Concerto - by prefixing his scores with a motto. Formal clarity and understandability are a requirement for him. His music is characterized by free tonality that always includes tonal sections. Gunther Rost was able to win two prominent guest musicians for this CD: Tine Ting Helseth (trumpet) and Babette Haag (percussion).

Antonio Salieri’s (1750-1825) catalog of instrumental music is not particularly extensive. +The symphonic works known from available recordings include two symphonies, several concerti, serenades and the like. +There is, also, a small body of chamber works, including those present on this disc. +Oboist Paolo Pollastri (b. 1960) has been first oboe of numerous orchestras and performs often as a soloist. +The Canadian Amati Quartet made its international debut in 2005 and indulges in a diverse repertoire.

The Avalon String Quartet, “a remarkably fine ensemble” (The Strad), makes its Cedille Records debut with an irresistible and richly varied program of captivating works by Claude Debussy, Benjamin Britten, Osvaldo Golijov, and rising American composer Stacy Garrop. The ensemble presents the world-premiere recording of Garrop’s String Quartet No. 4: Illuminations, a tantalizing, Pictures at an Exhibition-style tour of spectacular illustrations from an ornate medieval manuscript. Debussy’s lush, exotic String Quartet in G minor unfolds through iridescent quasi-orchestral textures. Golijov’s lyrical, deeply moving Tenebrae (Latin for “shadows”), written for the Kronos Quartet, pays tender tribute to the earth, depicted in its remote celestial beauty, haunted by undertones of human discord. Britten’s youthful, energetic Three Divertimenti and Alla Marcia are alluring, rarely recorded studies in inventiveness and perpetual motion.

The Avalon is quartet-in-residence at the Northern Illinois University School of Music. “…an ensemble that invites you — ears, mind, and spirit — into its music.” (Chicago Tribune)

REVIEW:

The folks at Cedille seem to have mastered the art of putting together classical music collections that make good musical sense. Debussy’s String Quartet is, of course, standard fare, and it usually appears in tandem with the Ravel and something else French. Not here. Instead, we have two Britten rarities, the entertaining Three Divertimenti and the lone Alla Marcia (the first of the Divertimenti is also a march, so you can see the logic), a self-described “Pictures at an Exhibition” type piece by Stacy Garrop, and a moving conclusion in the form of Osvaldo Golijov’s single-movement Tenebrae. The entire program provides consistently interesting and entertaining continuous listening, and the sonics are drop-dead gorgeous.

So, for that matter, is the playing of the Avalon String Quartet. The group’s corporate sonority is warm and mellow, but with just a touch of “rosin” in the tone. They attack rhythmic moments such as the scherzo of the Debussy, the Burlesque and the marches in the Britten pieces, and Garrop’s musically impossibly named “Mouth of Hell” with plenty of guts and precision, but no unpleasant hardness in the tone. The slow music is simply luminous. I am not generally a fan of pseudo-religious programmatic stuff such as Garrop offers here, but it’s awfully well done, and the booklet provides well-produced, full-color reproductions of the illustrations from the late medieval Book of Hours that Garrop took as her inspiration. They are exquisite, as is much of Garrop’s writing more generally.

Here, in short, is another excellent program that chamber music fans looking to venture off the beaten path will surely relish.

- ClassicsToday.com (10/10)

R. STRAUSS Violin Sonata, Op. 18. RESPIGHI Violin Sonata in b. Six Pieces: Melodia; Valse caressante; Serenata • Tasmin Little (vn); Piers Lane (pn) • CHANDOS 10749 (65:50)

Violinist Tasmin Little has amassed a very respectable discography on a number of different labels, though of late, she seems to have settled in as one of Chandos’s house artists. Her recent recording of Delius’s Violin Concerto received an urgent recommendation from me in 35:4, so I really looked forward to receiving her latest release of these two late romantic sonatas.


On the surface, Richard Strauss and Respighi may not seem to have a lot in common, but their respective violin sonatas have been paired on disc before, notably by Kyung-Wha Chung and Krystian Zimerman for Deutsche Grammophon and by Frank Almond and William Wolfram for Avie. Strauss composed his sonata in 1887 at the age of 23. It’s an inspired outpouring of youth hardly recognizable as music by the composer that Strauss would become. Respighi’s B-Minor Sonata—an earlier sonata in D Minor dates from the composer’s teens—was written in 1917, exactly 30 years later than Strauss’s sonata, by a more mature composer of 38.


Strauss’s sonata will no doubt be permanently associated with Heifetz, not because he championed it and twice recorded it, but because of his callous and stubborn determination to perform the piece in 1953 before an Israeli audience that still considered Strauss a Nazi collaborator and whose emotions were still raw from the Holocaust. That little stunt nearly cost Heifetz his career when an assailant attacked him outside his hotel, striking his right arm with an iron bar. While I don’t condone the death threats and violence against him, I understand the intensity of feelings that were aroused. Heifetz had no one to blame but himself for his own arrogance and intractable insensitivity. He canceled his last concert and departed Israel post haste, not to return there again until 1970.


The shame of it all is that Strauss’s sonata was written half a century before Hitler rose to power, and the piece is a passionate and deeply touching reflection of the late 19th-century German musical culture in which Strauss came of age. Unsurprisingly, Liszt and Wagner, both recently dead, appear as frequent ghosts throughout the sonata’s pages, but another guest one meets, less frequently perhaps but still very much alive when Strauss wrote the piece, is Brahms.


Respighi is not an easy composer to categorize. Some see him, as they see Strauss, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, and Sibelius as manifestations of a resistant strain of late romanticism that persisted well into the 20th century, while others have referred to Respighi as an Impressionist. I think one could support either view. There’s no question but that Respighi’s sonata is the more modern of the two works on the disc, at least in terms of its approach to harmony and tonality, but it remains an essentially romantic work in its gestural language—i.e., in its sweeping vistas and appeal to the emotions, both public and private.


The last time I reviewed a recording of Strauss’s violin sonata was in 32:3. That Atma CD also contained violin and piano works by Elgar and Ravel in performances by Jonathan Crow and Paul Stewart which I called “a desideratum of indescribably beautiful music matched by indescribably beautiful playing.” Pardon the pun, but Tasmin Little brings more than a little of Crow’s eloquent and elegant playing to the Strauss, but I would also have to say that in some of the sonata’s more technically taxing passages, she can sound ever so slightly flustered; and while the notes never actually get away from her, one senses she’s making an effort to stay on top of them. Next to Crow’s Strauss, another performance I’ve long liked is that by Dmitri Sitkovetsky on Virgin Classics. He has the technical chops to pull it off smoothly, but I don’t find him quite as emotionally engaged as either Crow or Little. Whatever the reason, Respighi’s sonata seems to suit Little a little better, both technically and temperamentally. Her performance of the piece is lithe and fully responsive to the score’s rapidly shifting moods and colors. In my opinion, it easily outclasses Tanja Becker-Bender on Hyperion, whose reading I find somewhat flighty and rudderless.


Overall, this has to be rated a very fine effort, and not just by Little, but also by Piers Lane who partners her most excellently on the piano, and by Chandos, which provides its usual deep and vivid sound. This may not be the absolute best Strauss out there, but it’s definitely among the very best of the Respighis, and the extra three encores from Respighi’s Six Pieces for Violin and Piano make for a most enriching program. Easily recommended.

FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

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Chandos have prided themselves on having a deep and long-term available back catalogue. Though distantly separated in time the present CD can be seen as an adjunct to two of the grand Chandos series of the 1980s and 1990s. The first was the Respighi orchestral music edition built around the Edward Downes BBCPO symphonies and concertos but supplemented by earlier discs conducted by Geoffrey Simon - still truly splendid - and later ones from Hickox and Noseda. The Downes and Simon discs would shine anew if issued in a box or boxes. The second comprised the half dozen discs they issued in the 1980s golden days of Järvi conducting the then SNO in the major orchestral works of Richard Strauss.

These two violin and piano works have previously appeared - although separately - on Chandos. There were in fact two CDs of the Strauss Sonata – one from Lydia Mordkovitch and the other from Sasha Rozhdestvensky. It comes as no surprise that the Respighi was also recorded by Mordkovitch. She contributed so much to the label that I have every reason to expect that, one of these days, there will be a complete Mordkovitch Chandos Edition. It’s certainly deserved – at least as much as a Takako Nishizaki edition for Naxos.

Little and Lane’s Strauss Sonata is flooded with melodic light and surges and muses with all the eruptive and serenading romance of the same composer’s Don Juan. Both Tasmin Little and Piers Lane are obviously up for it and flatter the 1887 Strauss with a most inward reading which makes it appear a greater work than perhaps it is. The stormy romance of the outer movements of the 1917 Respighi Sonata is emphasised by the utterly peaceful and romantically centred Sargasso calm of the Andante second movement. It stands head and shoulders above the other sonata movements on this disc, masterfully treading that febrile line between poetry and self-conscious sentimentality. Both Little and Lane have every right to be proud of their achievement here. Speaking of that mood we have three movements from the salon-destined and designed Sei Pezzi. I lament that the other three Kreislerian movements were not included – there was space. A puzzling and regretted omission.

With thanks to Chandos for commissioning a liner-note from the inspired Jessica Duchen. Such a fine writer and one whose Korngold book (Phaidon Press) has been unjustly eclipsed by the ‘major definitive biography’. The Duchen is much more than a valid alternative. Indeed, Korngold is a far from irrelevant comparison in the company of the two composers so nobly represented on this disc.

– Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

The composer Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906–94) was something of a Portuguese Shostakovich: as a committed socialist, he faced repression from Portugal’s rightist military dictatorship; his works were banned and he was stripped of his official positions. Lopes-Graça responded in music, evolving a feisty, wiry Bartókian style that drew on Portuguese folk-music. This recording features Lopes-Graça’s own Bechstein piano, played by Olga Prats, who worked closely with him. Reviewing Vol. 1, Fanfare stated: “… the disc should be heard by 20th c. music lovers… a strong, individual voice”.

REVIEW:

Lopes-Graça’s First String Quartet won the Rainier III Composition Prize in 1965 and the composer then began to receive some of the public recognition he deserved. Eventually, some of his symphonic works were recorded. In the 1970s his writings were published and he was honored for his contributions to Portuguese culture. He composed a great many pieces during the last 20 years of his life, one of which is his Second String Quartet. The second movement contains a folk dance that extends into a rhythmic dialogue with dramatic overtones and a propulsive undercurrent. The third movement, “Cavatina,” is an aria with a long melodic line but without the cabaletta that would follow it in a bel canto opera. The finale includes material from the first movement as well as new music in a memorable whirl of interesting textures. This disc is a must for connoisseurs of 20th-century music and those who love unusual string quartets. I really enjoyed it and expect others so inclined will too.

-- Fanfare

Brahms originally wrote the Piano Quintet, Op. 34, for string quintet before recasting the work as a two-piano sonata. However, the sheet music has not ever been recovered. So, finnish cellist Karttunen set about its reconstruction. The result has all the vigor and power of the music we know but now recast in a different sonority.

REVIEW:

Another triumph for a small independent label. Brilliant thought provoking re-evaluations of ‘standard’ works by Brahms. The double viola version of the clarinet quintet in Brahms’ own arrangement is especially rewarding featuring some of the most beautiful viola playing I have ever heard from Steven Dann. Life-enhancing stuff.

-- MusicWeb International

Bach compiled his set of six trio sonatas for organ during the late 1720s. They are thought to have been put together as training material for Bach’s son Wilhelm Friedemann and can be grouped among other pedagogical keyboard collections such as the Inventions and the Well-Tempered Clavier. They are unique, however, in transferring the typical trio sonata texture, a popular style normally played by ensemble, to a single instrument. In Bach’s originals the right and left hands take the top two parts while the pedals perform the bass line. The first movement of Sonata No. 4 was originally composed for ensemble and the unique formal and stylistic characteristics of the collection suggest that other movements, too, started life away from the organ.

Taking this on board, Tempesta di Mare Chamber Players have re-imagined these works in arrangements for ensemble, using scorings typically adopted in the performance of trio sonatas in Bach’s time. Bach was himself a serial adapter and re-arranger of his own works and this recording takes on his understanding of the musical work as a fluid entity, able to assume as many forms as there are purposes for them.

The Philadelphia-based early music ensemble Tempesta di Mare is renowned for its unique programming and championing of rarely performed works, not least through its fruitful relationship with Chandos Records. - Chandos Records

Arranged for chamber ensemble by Richard Stone.

Tempesta di Mare Chamber Players:
Gwyn Roberts recorder - flauto traverso
Emlyn Ngai violin
Karina Schmitz violin - viola
Lisa Terry cello - viola da gamba
Richard Stone lute
Adam Pearl harpsichord
Recorded in: Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

The Lutenist Axel Wolf and the Saxophonist Hugo Siegmeth - Who Join Forces Here - Are Two Musicians with Roots in Completely Different Musical Disciplines. A Virtuoso on the Lute and Theorbo, Axel Wolf Specializes in the Renaissance and Baroque Periods, Whereas Hugo Siegmeth, Saxophonist and Composer, Is An Expert on Modern Jazz and Contemporary Music. Although Several Centuries Lie Between the Heydays of Both Musical Styles, with 'Flow', These Two Musicians Both Place Special Focus on Improvisation: Involvement in the Surprising Moment and Spontaneous Interaction.

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