The young Israeli-Swedish flutist Sharon Bezaly is both daring and prolific, issuing disc after disc on Sweden's BIS label devoted to unfamiliar virtuoso music and nailing it almost every time. Here she enters the nascent field of cross-cultural concert music. With its Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-like cover photo, this is perhaps an especially risky endeavor, but Bezaly pulls it off in fine style. The notes (in English, Chinese, German, and French) give plenty of information about the music, but it would have been nice ...
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The young Israeli-Swedish flutist Sharon Bezaly is both daring and prolific, issuing disc after disc on Sweden's BIS label devoted to unfamiliar virtuoso music and nailing it almost every time. Here she enters the nascent field of cross-cultural concert music. With its Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-like cover photo, this is perhaps an especially risky endeavor, but Bezaly pulls it off in fine style. The notes (in English, Chinese, German, and French) give plenty of information about the music, but it would have been nice to hear a little about how Bezaly and the Taipei Chinese Orchestra assembled the program. Presumably conductor Chung Yiu-Kwong deserves at least some of the credit, for the selection of music avoids the monotony that sometimes plagues releases of this sort and showcases Bezaly's considerable skills from a variety of perspectives. The key is that the Chinese compositions represent a variety of types, from semi-traditional (The Thivats of Autumn, track 5, which is one of several pieces...
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