Various Artists - Berlin - SUPER-AUDIO CD [Super Audio CD (SACD)]

The fourth and final recording of Agnieszka Budzinska-Bennett's InchMare BalticumInch project with and about music from the Baltic region, the first of which has already received the coveted ICMA, is perhaps the most beautiful. One-part melodies sung by four women in their own rhythm and yet in complete unison transport us to the bygone world of the Middle Ages. Solo songs bring us even closer to that time. For instance, when - this is just one example - Lorenza Donadini as Mary laments the death of Jesus, we hear the grief of a living mother over the death of her own child. What a pity that this excursion into the past lasts only 79 minutes!

Flanders Recorder Duo The name of the ensemble rightly suggests that it emerged from the Flanders Recorder Quartet, which ended it's incredibly successful international stage career in 2018. Already the FRQ amazed with the expressiveness of it's InchonlyInch 4 recorders. The Flanders Recorder Duo now takes this to the extreme. Really only two musicians are to be heard here, but often one hardly believes this when listening to the debut album, which is simply called InchFR2Inch. A highlight is certainly the world premiere of a suite by Vaughan Williams. But the other performances from various eras also give listeners plenty of opportunity to enjoy and be amazed.

For her fifth on BIS Clare Hammond has constructed an adventurous programme of twentieth and twenty-first-century variations for piano. From the imposing Chaconne by Sofia Gubaidulina, to the tender grief of Paul Hindemith's variations or Aaron Copland's bold and uncompromising proclamation, the disc presents a fresh perspective on the genre. Hammond opens with Karol Szymanowski's Variations on a Polish Theme from 1904, a virtuosic and intensely Romantic outpouring that contrasts strikingly with the wit and irreverence of Helmut Lachenmann's set on a theme by Schubert. The most recent works in the programme are Harrison Birtwistle's mercurial elegy and it's polar opposite I Still Play, a lyrical waltz composed in 2017 by John Adams. Described as 'a star interpreter of contemporary music' (The Observer), Clare Hammond has developed a reputation for imaginative concert programming. As she herself admits in her liner notes, variation form may on the surface appear to be both limiting and limited, but the works she presents here transcend the form in myriad creative, and at times daring, ways.