Frost & Hough & Imai & Berlin - Quintets - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Birtwhistle / Ensemble Recherche - Renaissance Transcriptions [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/01/2011

Following their critically acclaimed debut album, the Belfiato Quintet have gone back a century in time, to the Inchfather of the wind quintetInch Antonín Rejcha's life was adventurous and turbulent indeed. When he was 10, he ran away from his Prague home, and would live in turn in Bonn, Hamburg and Vienna, before finally settling in Paris. He presented his first symphony at the tender age of 17. Rejcha became a friend of Beethoven's, who played the viola in the same orchestra, he made the acquaintance with Haydn, and his teachers included Salieri. A keen experimenter, he liked to write in quintuple time, was fascinated by Gypsy music with micro-intervals, playing with numbers and chords, polyrhythm, polytonality and counterpoint. Moreover, he was an accomplished theorist and a renowned teacher, also working as a professor at the Conservatoire de Paris. His students included Liszt, Berlioz, Franck and other distinguished composers. Rejcha was the first to write truly masterful wind quintets, making full use of the instruments' timbres and technical potential. Notwithstanding it's being challenging to perform, his music comes across as bright, airy and gracious. The Belfiato Quintet selected three - the most beautiful and most engrossing - of Rejcha's 24 wind quintets, which they have recorded at the acoustically exceptionable Rudolfinum hall in Prague. It would seem that the virtuoso and passionate musicians have found in Rejcha a kindred spirit.

The pieces featured on the present album are staples of Belfiato Quintet's modern repertoire and are, above all, music close to their heart. Each of them occupies a special position in the ensemble's history. Carl Nielsen's Wind Quintet is the very first work they explored and performed, while their rendition of Cinq danses profanes et sacrées at the 2011 Henri Tomasi International Woodwind Quintet Competition in Marseille earned the prize for the best interpretation of a Tomasi composition. And the other works included on the album have played significant roles in the ensemble's career too. The five pieces, dating from between 1922 and 1964, represent their creators' specific InchelementsInch, as well as the diverse music traditions of their native countries. Yet the album's title may also refer to five highly distinct figures who - perhaps precisely owing to their being so distinct - form a superbly harmonized ensemble that possesses a remarkable variety of tone quality and shades of expression. Belfiato Quintet are indisputably a world-class ensemble, with regard to the present album's repertoire and beyond. Belfiato Quintet - five elements chiming in perfect harmony