'The combination of oboe, bassoon, and piano is not a common one, but the Sundance Trio is making a go of it. Its debut disc on Centaur pulls together no less than five works for such ensemble, and overall it is a bright, melodious, and attractive program. The key work here is the opener, the Trio (1972) by Madeleine Dring, who was a stage actress in addition to being a composer and is one of the best-kept secrets of twentieth century English music. Dring's style is bright, cosmopolitan, slightly jazzy, and gently neo ...
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'The combination of oboe, bassoon, and piano is not a common one, but the Sundance Trio is making a go of it. Its debut disc on Centaur pulls together no less than five works for such ensemble, and overall it is a bright, melodious, and attractive program. The key work here is the opener, the Trio (1972) by Madeleine Dring, who was a stage actress in addition to being a composer and is one of the best-kept secrets of twentieth century English music. Dring's style is bright, cosmopolitan, slightly jazzy, and gently neo-classical with a renaissance bent, and the piano part here was originally scored for harpsichord. Inspiration drawn from antique models is something of a subtext throughout this program; Paul Angerer's Chanson Gaillarde (1963) is a tuneful, colorful, and sensitive piece that works Baroque concepts into an orderly neo-classic idiom and belies its chronological context of having been written in the unfettered '60s. Geoffrey Bush's Trio (1953) is likewise based in the Baroque, but is more...
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