Sweden's BIS label has taken upon itself the task of reviving the concerto genre for contemporary times, and Scandinavia's large crop of young composers has been only too happy to oblige with new works. Prolific Norwegian trumpeter and cornetist Ole Edvard Antonsen here blares his way through no fewer than four new works of diverse character, most of them with an appealingly playful style even as they are undergirded with various sophisticated techniques. The Concerto for trumpet and orchestra of Finnish composer Harri ...
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Sweden's BIS label has taken upon itself the task of reviving the concerto genre for contemporary times, and Scandinavia's large crop of young composers has been only too happy to oblige with new works. Prolific Norwegian trumpeter and cornetist Ole Edvard Antonsen here blares his way through no fewer than four new works of diverse character, most of them with an appealingly playful style even as they are undergirded with various sophisticated techniques. The Concerto for trumpet and orchestra of Finnish composer Harri Wessman, composed in 1987 for a small municipal orchestra in Finland, is a jaunty take-off on the oft-mooted affinity between Baroque music and jazz; Wessman takes his harmonies from jazz and his square rhythms and clear formal structure from the Baroque, and he complied with a request to give the last movement "a kind of Robin Hood mood." The most intriguing work is perhaps Alfred Janson's Norwegian Dance for cornet and strings, which is only intermittently dancelike -- instead, Janson...
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