This fifth Naxos release of the music of the Franco-Lebanese composer Bechara El-Khoury features three concertos two of which, for wind instruments, are inspired by...

This fifth Naxos release of the music of the Franco-Lebanese composer Bechara El-Khoury features three concertos two of which, for wind instruments, are inspired by specific associations with the natural world of the composer’s native Lebanon. The First Violin Concerto contains allusions to Alban Berg, its outer movements divided by a virtuoso cadenza for the soloist. The composer describes his powerful Horn Concerto as ‘mountains at night… reaching up into the sky and melting into mist and space’, and the Clarinet Concerto as ‘impressions and recollections in which poetic colors link together and disappear, like an autumnal cloud’.