0ktober 2012 – “Blazing speed, the sharpest ensemble precision and rhythm, intensely present sound, flawless intonation, clear and compelling phrasing, and a startling range of dynamics on instruments that are supposed to have almost none at all…”
No less than three works of mine on this wonderful new cd of the Flanders Recorder Quartet, aka ‘Four in a Row’. The program results from their series of Jukebox Concerts….
No less than three works of mine are featured on this wonderful new cd of the Flanders Recorder Quartet: Kadanza and the first two of the series of Angelic pieces, Catch (an Angel) en Stamping Ground (for Angels). The choice of pieces is a result of their special interactive approach to concert programming. As The Flemish Four themselves put it on their website:
“During the 2010-2011 season, Flanders Recorder Quartet presented an exceptional programme: its own Jukebox in concert. This time there was no thematic programme, no following Pierre de la Rue’s footsteps, no selection of songs by Henry VIII, but a radically new proposition. In Jukebox the audience would decide on what FRQ was going to play that afternoon or evening.
The concept was as easy as it was straightforward: FRQ brought along all its instruments and folders of music scores. The collection of over a hundred available pieces offers a beautiful cross-section of the varied literature for recorder, as well as personal favourites of Tom Beets, Bart Spanhove, Joris Van Goethem and Paul Van Loey. A computer would tally the audience vote and hand us the result, giving us fifteen minutes before the concert to decide on the order. Wherever we tried it, whether in a small mansion in Germany, a country school in Flanders or a music festival in South Korea, it worked!”
Twenty Jukebox shows later, they drew the balance. How do fans answer the question: What would you like to hear again? First of all, they favour the spectacular: virtuosic, engaging, upbeat, swinging, a little crazy. The pieces that incarnate all these attributes turn out to often be the encores at a FRQ concert. The pleasure that the audience and the four musicians got from Jukebox finds a culmination on this CD. Encore!
