(++++) IN CONCLUSION

Bruckner from the Archives, Volume 5: Symphonies Nos. 6 and 7; Te Deum. NDR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi (No. 6); South German Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hans Müller-Kray (No. 7); Wilma Lipp, Elisabeth Höngen, Nicolai Gedda, Walter Kreppel, Vienna Singverein and Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan (Te Deum). Ariadne. $29.99 (2 CDs).

Bruckner from the Archives, Volume 6: Symphonies Nos. 8 and 9; Psalm 150. Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eugen Jochum (No. 8); Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch (No. 9); Hilde Česka, soprano, with Vienna Akademie Kammerchor and Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Henry Swoboda (Psalm 150). Ariadne. $29.99 (2 CDs).

     One of the most ambitious and revelatory projects conceived for the Bruckner bicentennial in 2024 was a six-volume, 12-disc release of remastered historic recordings of all the symphonies and a number of the composer’s shorter works, most of them radio airchecks that had never been released before. The final two volumes of this series on the Ariadne label are at the same very high performance and more-than-satisfactory audio quality level as the first four, showing yet again that even before Bruckner’s symphonies became part of the more-or-less standard repertoire for many conductors and orchestras, there were performers advocating them in the strongest possible terms through sensitive, often compelling readings that set the stage for the vast proliferation of concert-hall and recording-studio versions that were still to come.

     The downside to that proliferation has been a certain argumentativeness and quirkiness in some more-recent Bruckner performances, with disputes over which editions to use, what sort of pacing to employ, and whether or not to conform to the longstanding if largely inaccurate belief that Bruckner’s symphonies are in some sense organ-like works with a cathedral-appropriate sense of majesty and spirituality. The Bruckner Archives performances date to an earlier time when, generally speaking, Bruckner’s place within the pantheon of Romantic-era symphonists was accepted at face value and conductors saw his unusual combination of rhythmic, harmonic and contrapuntal approaches as matters of style within his time period – resulting in readings in which his debt to Schubert and his parallels to and divergences from the sound of Wagner were particularly clear. This adds up to a salutary straightforwardness in the Bruckner Archives symphonic performances, including those in the fifth and sixth volumes.

     The approach is quite evident in the 1961 recording of Symphony No. 6 by the NDR Symphony Orchestra under Christoph von Dohnányi – who also led Symphony No. 5 in Bruckner from the Archives, Volume 4, where he conducted the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. Although Dohnányi was not a conductor usually associated with Bruckner, and in 1961 was not focused primarily on the concert hall (he was General Music Director of Lübeck Opera from 1957 to 1963), this rendition has a pleasant directness and a sense throughout of controlled emotional expression – slightly cool, all in all, with everything in its place and nothing sounding overdone or overextended. Bruckner’s Sixth has never been among his more-popular symphonies, but this approach actually shows ways in which it can reach out effectively through a straightforward presentation that neither reduces nor overemphasizes its intricacies (especially in matters of rhythm) and that allows its lyrical elements, especially in the Adagio, to glow. Very different but equally fine in its own way is the reading of Symphony No. 7 featuring Hans Müller-Kray and the South German Radio Symphony Orchestra (now the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra). Not a particularly well-known conductor nowadays, Müller-Kray led this ensemble for more than two decades. This performance dates to 1955 and, despite sound that is not quite at the highest level despite the general excellence of the Lani Spahr/Siva Oke remastering, the reading effectively hits the emotional high points of the symphony, notably the extended cello-led theme of the first movement, the coloration of the Wagner tubas in the Adagio, and the dramatic power of the finale. The symphonies are complemented by a somewhat odd Te Deum reading led by Herbert von Karajan, a brilliant and strong-willed conductor who sometimes came across as if he knew better than the composers themselves what the composers were trying to say. There is some flavor of that in this 1962 Vienna Festival performance, which was given in the hall where the Te Deum was originally heard. Everything is very much in place and very precisely balanced and paced here: the strength of instruments and vocalists is everywhere apparent. But this Te Deum seems less a deeply religious work than an operatic approach to sacred material – a bit along the lines of Verdi’s Requiem. The sense of drama is apparent throughout and is quite impressive, all the more so when the voices occasionally sound pushed to their limits; but the purpose of all the splendor, the underlying celebration of deep faith, gets somewhat short shrift. This is, in its dramatic way, a highly involving performance, but its way is perhaps not quite the way that Bruckner intended it to take.

     The other great sacred work in the last two Bruckner from the Archives volumes, Psalm 150, fares better, perhaps because its more-unidimensional atmosphere – it is strictly an ebullient hymn of praise – is more direct and accessible than the somewhat more-nuanced Te Deum. Unlike most other performances in the Bruckner from the Archives series, this one has been available before, on Westminster Records, one of whose three co-founders was conductor Henry Swoboda – who leads the Vienna Akademie Kammerchor and Vienna Symphony Orchestra in this reading, which dates to 1950. Psalm 150, like the Te Deum, is in C major, but Psalm 150 is half the length of the earlier work (the Te Deum dates to 1884, Psalm 150 to 1892 – it is Bruckner’s last major sacred work). The shorter time frame and sustained brightness of the music, with words that are themselves music-focused through references to trombones, harps, drums, cymbals and other instruments, make for a well-thought-through and nicely balanced performance in which Swoboda remains firmly in control of his forces.

     Firm control is also a hallmark of Bruckner’s Eighth as conducted by Eugen Jochum and played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in a 1957 recording. Unlike many other conductors heard in the Bruckner from the Archive releases, who are skilled but not especially known for their Bruckner performances, Jochum (1902-1987) was a Bruckner expert whose roots as an advocate of the composer date all the way back to 1926, when Jochum made his professional conducting debut leading Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7. He made the very first commercial recording of Bruckner’s Eighth in 1949, using the later-discredited Haas edition of the symphony. By 1957 Jochum was using and advocating the 1955 Nowak edition, and he gives an absolutely first-rate performance of it here, abetted by an orchestra of which he was the founding conductor eight years earlier. All the musical stars align for this first-rate reading, one of the few performances in the Bruckner from the Archives series whose value extends far beyond its historical significance. Jochum takes the full measure of the symphony, to which he brings a sense of very large scale and great drama: this is Bruckner at his most gripping. Nor is emotion in short supply: Jochum plumbs the lyrical and expressive depths of the work from start to finish, turning the Eighth into a deeply moving and very powerful experience – and a thoroughly unified one, which is not at all how this symphony comes across in lesser hands. Of all the remarkable “lost” recordings that this series has rediscovered, this is one of the most outstanding.

     Symphony No. 9 as performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch is not quite at the rarefied level of Jochum’s Eighth, but it too is a highly effective and evocative reading that, by the end, will surely leave listeners wishing – and not for the first time – that Bruckner had lived to complete the finale, which he almost finished but which is not performed by Sawallisch or most other conductors in any of its various completions by other hands. Sawallisch, less of a Bruckner specialist than Jochum, nevertheless has a very strong connection to the composer: Sawallisch led the Vienna Symphony for a decade, starting in 1960, and this happens to be the orchestra that gave the first performance of Bruckner’s Ninth (in 1903, seven years after the composer’s death). That première occurred in the Großer Saal of the Vienna Musikverein, which is exactly where Sawallisch and the orchestra made this recording in 1966. Of course, all the musicians involved were different from those at the work’s first-ever performance, but all great orchestras have a kind of “ship of Theseus” air about them in which the past carries, however evanescently, into the present. In any case, the manner of approaching Bruckner’s Ninth seems to have been passed along, whether directly by prior orchestra members to their successors or indirectly under more mystical circumstances, to the players heard here, because the performance is so idiomatic, so sure-handed, so effective in the way it unfolds and builds within and among the three completed movements, that it very nearly makes a convincing case for regarding this as a fully finished work. Certainly Sawallisch thoroughly explores the very deep and sometimes contradictory emotive elements of the symphony, allowing its intense portions to ring forth with great power while keeping its more-delicate elements extremely quiet and reserved. He treats the fascinating, weirdly flickering Scherzo as a kind of interlude between the grand edifices of the first and third movements, letting it explore its own strange landscape while providing a change of scene, if not exactly any respite, from the intensity of the remainder of the symphony. The extreme dissonance near the end of the third movement is handled especially well here, having a tragic (and almost desperate) character that would not be out of place in Mahler’s Symphony No. 6. To almost the same degree as Jochum’s Eighth, Sawallisch’s Ninth provides listeners with a reading on par interpretatively with just about any conductor’s offering in the many decades between these recordings and the bicentennial year of Bruckner’s birth. Indeed, the sixth Bruckner from the Archives release affirms and reaffirms the importance not only of the composer but also of this ambitious project’s determination to showcase mostly unreleased, long-ago performances of Bruckner’s symphonies and some other works. Taken as a whole, the 12 CDs in this exceptional set of releases vastly broaden audiences’ chances to hear and understand just how important a composer Bruckner was – and just how important were interpreters and interpretations dating to a time before Bruckner’s music was as familiar as it has since become.

(+++) IN TUNE WITH EMOTIONS

Richard Strauss: Sonata for Violin and Piano; Ernest Bloch: Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano; Fauré: Après un rêve, Op. 7, No. 1; Schubert: Ave Maria. Danbi Um, violin; Juho Pohjonen, piano. AVIE. $19.99.

Études for Piano by Boston-based Composers. Jihye Chang, piano. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Although most closely associated with the Romantic era, emotional evocation in music existed before that time period and most certainly continued to exist after it, right up to the present day. Works that invite and receive emotive playing do, however, pose something of a quandary in recorded form: even when they come from more or less the same time period, they are appealing as a total package only to listeners who respond to them in the same way that the performers who arranged the recital do. The personal nature of a recording such as a new AVIE release featuring Danbi Um and Juho Pohjonen is apparent throughout: the four pieces offered, two of them extended and two very brief, have little to do with each other and will be effective for audiences only to the extent that listeners bring with them a response pattern parallel to that of Um and Pohjonen themselves. Richard Strauss’ sole Sonata for Violin and Piano is an early work (1887) and scarcely groundbreaking, but it is filled with lyrical beauty that is interestingly complemented by considerable technical demands. Its emotions vary widely, not only in the sonata as a whole but also within individual movements: the first movement is dark-hued at the start and bright at the end, while the concluding third movement opens with quietly thoughtful feeling before becoming very decidedly outgoing. Um and Pohjonen explore the contrasts within the sonata skillfully, but the highlight of the performance is actually the central movement, marked Improvisation, which is the only one with a consistent mood: its meditative quality is here explored with considerable sensitivity and understanding. The other major work on this disc is the second and far less aurally challenging of Ernest Bloch’s violin sonatas, whose simplicity and lyricism – abetted by the inclusion of themes associated with both Judaism and Catholicism – produces a sense of uplift and mysticism, the latter reinforced by the sonata’s title of Poème mystique. Dating to 1924, Bloch’s sonata contains stylistic elements of its time combined with ones that Bloch said came to him after a mild barbiturate overdose. Um and Pohjonen play the sonata with sensitivity and understanding, but it is not as compelling a work as Bloch’s first violin-and-piano sonata and is not an especially felicitous juxtaposition with Richard Strauss’ sonata. Perhaps aware of this, the performers separate the two works with an arrangement for their instruments of Fauré’s Après un rêve, the first of the composer’s Trois melodies (1870-1877) for solo voice and piano. This is a pleasant enough work but not a particularly substantial one, serving here more as a placeholder than anything else. The CD concludes with another arrangement of a vocal work, Schubert’s ever-popular Ave Maria (Ellens dritter Gesang), which dates to 1825 and was not written as a setting of the “Ave Maria” prayer but as the sixth of seven songs in a cycle for various voices based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. The spiritual elements underlying the material are nevertheless the ones most associated with Schubert’s setting when, as here, it is heard out of context; and the piece is played by Um and Pohjonen with a suitable sense of uplift and devotion. The fact remains, though, that the four offerings on this disc fit at best uneasily with each other, and the recording will be most appealing only to listeners who hear it in the same spirit and with the same spiritual attentiveness that the performers themselves bring to all the music.

     Two hundred years on from Schubert’s work, the desire to express emotion through music remains as strong as ever, and contemporary composers reach for connections through various forms and at various lengths. Pianist Jihye Chang commissioned a series of études from Boston-based composers during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and depredations of 2020-2021, and a New Focus Recordings release showcases her performance of eight of these works. Aside from being thoroughly immersed in contemporary compositional techniques, the pieces have little in common: the feelings they seek to evoke and explore are as disparate as the composers themselves. A Bit of Noise in the System by Dan VanHassel skitters up and down the piano amid quick punctuation-point notes and chords. Nam-Ok Lee by Eun Young Lee jumps about the keyboard in exploratory fashion. Mind Stretch by Yu-Hui Chang is a kind of mini-encyclopedia of sounds and techniques that tumble over each other willy-nilly, while belletude (spelled without a capital letter) by Ketty Nez sounds mostly like background material above which interjections appear, and bariolage (no capital there either) by Marti Epstein is delicate, evanescent and often sounds barely there at all. Fleetude by John McDonald is thoroughly disconnected from itself through stop-and-go pacing and fragmented themes whose emotions change in quicksilver fashion, while Idée fixe by William David Cooper is emotionally split in two with its comparatively rigid first portion and more fantasia-like second part. The longest work here is three pieces in one under the title Lowell Études: Three Etchings on Solitude by Stratis Minakakis. Full understanding of the material requires familiarity with the poetry of Robert Lowell, but listeners to whom contemporary musical approaches are appealing will have little trouble recognizing the many uses of extended techniques, such as juxtaposition of the piano’s extreme registers and an emphasis on the piano as a percussion instrument through pedal-performance participation rather than simple enhancement. Chang plays all the études as if she believes thoroughly in their emotive constructs and their composers' sound worlds. Like-minded audiences will enjoy this journey to, through and around Boston’s musical scene, although it is only fair to point out that nothing in the recital bespeaks any particular element of location except insofar as technical and emotional engagement themselves create individualized aural geography.

(+++) SING HIGH, SING HIGHER

Korngold: Lieder des Abschieds; Brahms: Songs; Clara Schumann: Songs; Robert Schumann: Liederkreis, Op. 39; Der Nussbaum. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, countertenor; John Churchwell, piano. AVIE. $19.99.

Le Tre Soprano—The Three Ladies of Ferrara. Amanda Forsythe and Amanda Powell, sopranos; Amanda Crider, mezzo-soprano; Apollo’s Fire conducted by Jeannette Sorrell. AVIE. $19.99.

     Here are a couple of rather curious AVIE discs on which the mezzo-soprano turns out to be the lowest voice. Both recordings are certainly worth hearing for historical as well as purely musical reasons, but it seems unlikely that the music itself – as fine as some of it is – will be the main attraction for listeners to whom the CDs speak, or rather sing, fluently. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen is the latest in a string of countertenors building on the legacy of Alfred Deller (1912-1979) and Deller’s advocate, composer Michael Tippett – but Cohen, unlike Deller and most of his successors, chooses to employ the countertenor voice in the service of Romantic music rather than works from the Renaissance and Baroque time periods. This is a trifle quixotic, as are the specific works that Cohen sings and the order of their presentation. The CD opens with Korngold’s rather dour four-song sequence Lieder des Abschieds, whose focus on death, love and farewell lies rather uneasily in the male falsetto range. Written for medium voice, the songs can be performed by soprano – or countertenor – but their Mahlerian approach to sorrow makes for an odd introduction to Cohen’s recital. He does sing with feeling and emotional, if not vocal, heft, and John Churchwell provides fine piano accompaniment, but the material itself is somewhat at war with the vocal range. The Korngold is followed by something else rather odd: an interweaving of four Brahms songs with four by Clara Schumann, perhaps intended to underline their relationship (a friendship rather than romance, but deeper than many romances ever become) after Robert Schumann’s death. The four Brahms songs are from Op. 59 (No. 7, Mein wundes Herz, and No. 8, Dein blaues Auge hält so still) and Op. 57 (No. 5, In meiner Nächte Sehnen, and No. 8, Unbewegte laue Luft). Clara Schumann’s are her Op. 13, Nos. 1-4: Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen, Sie liebten sich beide, Liebeszauber, and Der Mond kommt still gegangen. The unity of the Clara Schumann material is undermined by intermingling these songs with the four out-of-context ones by Brahms, and while Cohen’s singing – which is clearly the primary point of this CD – is quite fine and suitably expressive, the supra-musical point of alternating Brahms and Clara Schumann interferes with all the songs’ emotionalism rather than expanding upon it. The high point of the disc, by a considerable margin, is Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39, which is sung complete and in the intended order. This Liederkreis (not to be confused with Schumann’s other grouping under the same title, Op. 24) brings out the interpretative best in Cohen, who sings with commitment, delicacy and just the right combination of lyricism and naïveté: the very short and upbeat Die Stille encapsulates his approach beautifully, especially when contrasted with darker but scarcely depressive songs such as Wehmut. It is in this cycle that Cohen makes the strongest argument for the effectiveness of the countertenor voice in repertoire with which it is not generally associated. After Liederkreis, the CD concludes, for no very apparent reason except for a title matching Cohen’s middle name, with Der Nussbaum, the third of the 26 songs from Robert Schumann’s Myrthen. This sort of refocuses the recital on Clara Schumann, for whom Myrthen was a wedding gift, but there is no real musical point in doing so: this CD is overly concerned with matters that are in large part extraneous to the music itself. Listeners interested in hearing how a male falsetto handles music not really intended for this vocal range – and in absorbing, in particular, the pleasures to be had from Cohen’s presentation of Liederkreis – will be the most-satisfied audience for this recording.

     The disc called Le Tre Soprano misses out on some alternative title possibilities. Its chosen title should be in the plural, as Soprani or even Sopranos, and it would have been interesting to call the disc “The Three Amandas,” given the first names of all the featured singers. It is logical to think that the secondary portion of the title is intended to distinguish the CD from anything involving the operatic trio known as “The Three Tenors” (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras), but in fact the Tre Donne di Ferrara predated the tenor trio by hundreds of years. In the late 1500s, instrumentalist/singers Laura Peverara (age 30), Anna Guarini (age 17), and Livia d’Arco (age 15) brought entertainment and a degree of fame to the duchy of Ferrara, and it is to their story that the latest recording by Apollo’s Fire and its leader, Jeannette Sorrell, refers. Like Cohen’s CD, this one is steeped in matters beyond the musical – Sorrell notes, in particular, that Guarini was murdered by the nobleman to whom she was married, who escaped unpunished (not a surprise in that time and place), while Ferrara itself was annexed to the Papal States in a matter of political intrigue peripherally involving the Tre Donne di Ferrara. Also as with Cohen’s CD, the sociopolitical freight is of little consequence when it comes to the music, providing context but no particular insight. The music itself is what matters here, as it should, and its enjoyment will depend on listeners’ affinity for works of this time period – many of which are heard here in arrangements by Sorrell and others. The pieces presented are unrelated to each other and are presented in five sections designed to show their topical similarities, if not necessarily their musical ones: “Dance of Life,” “In the Palace of Ferrara,” “Love Is Too Much,” “Disdain,” and “May I Have This Dance?” A short work by Monteverdi is the only one from a composer who remains well-known today. The other pieces are by such unfamiliar names as Andrea Falconieri, Luzzascho Luzzaschi, Alessandro Piccinini, Biagio Marini, Samuel Friedrich Capricornus, and others. The music is very much of its time, and as always, the period instruments expertly played by Apollo’s Fire – from Baroque violin and theorbo to Baroque triple harp – create a highly appealing sound world that is quite different from the ones more commonly heard and experienced today. In the vocal offerings, the three Amandas all sing stylishly and with a fine sense of phrasing, whether performing solo or together. The topics of the songs are very much of their time, and the settings fit the words well throughout, so even though there is nothing especially revelatory here either verbally or musically, the CD offers a finely honed, very well-performed journey through the centuries to an aural landscape that may not be to all tastes but that will be a real delight to listeners interested in experiencing some unusual and unusually pleasant material – despite the horrific-by-modern-standards circumstances in which these works were originally created and performed.

(+++) WITH A FRENCH ACCENT

Franck: Piano Quintet; Frank Bridge: Piano Quintet. Apple Hill String Quartet (Elise Kuder and Jesse MacDonald, violins; Mike Kelley, viola; Jacob MacKay, cello); Sally Pinkas, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

Michel Merlet: Chamber  Music for Flute, Cello and Piano. Leslie Neighbor Stroud, flute; Peter Zay, cello; Matthew Odell, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

     There were considerable differences among the French, German and Italian styles during the Baroque era, although not all of them are readily apparent to modern ears. The differences persisted for centuries, sometimes in notable ways: for example, as opera developed, German style tended to emphasize the orchestra, Italian the voice, and French a fairly equal partnership between the two. The stylistic distinctions, often subtle, inform the basic sound of a wide variety of works, and some continue to be audible even today. Certainly César Franck’s 1879 F minor Piano Quintet (at whose première the piano was played by Saint-Saëns) has emotional and textural underpinnings that mark it as a French work. It is intense and turbulent from its first bars, using two much-repeated four-bar phrases as structural building blocks and proceeding throughout its three movements with sensitivity and sometimes contradictory feelings: the finale is marked Allegro non troppo ma con fuoco, a somewhat puzzling indication that the performers on an MSR Classics release seem to have internalized particularly well. Written late in Franck’s life, the quintet is not a summary of experience but an ardent exploration of the emotional world that the composer visited frequently. The work contrasts interestingly, if not perhaps in a fully satisfying way, with the Piano Quintet of Frank Bridge, a work of a later time period (1905/1912) that is also in a minor key (D minor) but that dates to its composer’s earlier years. British music found its own direction in the 20^th century, but this Bridge quintet has some sensibilities in common with Franck’s in its expressiveness, its front-weighting (the first movement is the longest in both pieces), and its considerable lyricism – especially, and to an almost overdone degree, in the central Adagio ma non troppo, a fusing of two movements from the work’s original four-movement version. Sally Pinkas and the Apple Hill String Quartet approach the Bridge with engagement and much the same intensity they bring to the Franck, thus displaying the works in ways that give them more parallelisms than the music, at face value, actually possesses. The gracefulness of the Bridge does owe something to French sensibilities – Bridge had studied various European composers and absorbed elements from many of them – and if the work does not quite have its own voice, it at least speaks with eloquence in the ones Bridge had learned.

     By the later 20^th century, French music tended to have more of an international flavor than it possessed earlier, but its poise and precision continued to owe something to history. Another MSR Classics release shows this in chamber music for flute, cello and piano by Michel Merlet (born 1939). Merlet has written a significant number of works and won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1966, but his music is not especially well-known and not often recorded: of the seven pieces on this CD, five are world première recordings. The works were composed over a three-decade time frame, 1966 to 1995, but all share a similar sense of balance between or among instruments and a commitment to compositional techniques and sounds of the mid-to-late 20^th century. There is one piece for solo flute, Le roque de sol-ut-ré (1995), whose three movements showcase Merlet’s interest in Bach (a consistent element of his style) while also displaying his determination to interpret movements called Prélude, Passacaille and Fugue in ways commensurate with modern sensibilities – including unusual performance techniques and eliciting surprising percussive sounds from the flute. The flute appears with piano in three works: En tous sens… (1966, spelled with ellipsis), Sonatine (1968), and Chacone (1970). The rather dark meandering of the first of these is engaging; the second, in three movements, seems to bend over backwards to assert its dissonant bona fides; the third uses Bach as a jumping-off point and jumps a rather considerable distance. Also here are two works for cello and piano: Une soirée à Nohant (1980) and Prélude–Interlude–Postlude (1992). The first, labeled Élégie, is warm enough and delves into a degree of lyricism, although it is something short of elegiac; the second is explicitly tied to Bach – its opening comes directly from his works – and contrasts the two instruments in intriguing ways, keeping them separate until the concluding movement. The longest piece on the CD is a four-movement Trio for flute, cello and piano, dating to 1983 and neatly encapsulating Merlet’s varying interests in Bach’s music, in contemporary sounds and performance practices, and in combinatorial musical aesthetics. Although not the most-recent work on the disc, it functions as a kind of summation of the elements of the other six, all of which are played with dedication and style by the three very accomplished performers. Elements of Merlet’s music draw on distinctly French sensibilities – notably in some of the ways he employs the flute – while other material is much more of its time and much less of Merlet’s nationality and geography. The music will appeal mostly to people who enjoy works of the time period in which these pieces were written: there is certainly skill in evidence throughout the works, if not perhaps any particular interest in breaking free from conventions of a specific time period and trying to forge new and distinctive musical impressions.