Fables (Alberto Ginastera - Wilhelm Friedemann Bach - Robert Suter)

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The literature of duets for oboe and flute, with no bass instrument, is not large, and in putting together an album's worth the veteran Swiss musicians Heinz Holliger (oboe) and Felix Renggli (flute) come up with a rather mixed bag of pieces. The good news is that they include some real finds and play them well. The three sonatas for oboe and flute of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach are taken from a group of six he composed at various times in his career, and you can see why this most Bachian of Bach's sons might have been attracted to the experiment. The outer movements of these sonatas are rigorously polyphonic, with the flute and oboe contributing textural variation in the manner of the different stops of an organ, but at a more intimate scale. It's a delightful effect. The rest of the music comes from the 20th century. The disc opens with a pleasant but unremarkable instance of the neo-classic/nationalist style of Albert Ginastera's early career. It's rounded out by a pair of Swiss works of the 1960s and 1970s that were originally written for Holliger and here receive their world premieres. Both are serial pieces that will be of most interest to adherents of that school; the Five Duets for flute and oboe of Robert Suter, first performed at Montreal's Expo 67, is the only work on the disc to incorporate extended techniques. Recommended for the three W.F. Bach duets, which may well stimulate players to investigate the rest of the set.
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