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American Recorder

Somewhat of a sequel to “A Garland for John McCabe”, Rawsthorne and Other Rarities contains 11 works – six employing recorder and one with bamboo pipe. Alan Rawsthorne, Halsey Stevens, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Arthur Bliss are well-known 20th –century composers on this disc. Their works here are appealing – but with the exception of Stevens’s Sonatina Piacevole, do not use the recorder.

However, works from perhaps less familiar composers – Basil Deane’s The Rose Tree, Karel Janovicky’s The Little Linden Pipe and Malcolm Lipkin’s The Journey (the last two unaccompanied recorder), Donald Waxman’s Serenade and Caprice and David Ellis’s Mount Street Blues – are strong pieces that deserve inclusion in performance and courses of study. The Journey and Mount Street Blues are dedicated to the memory of John McCabe.

As in the disc of pieces honoring McCabe [DDA 25166], the sequencing of tracks is very well done. Good recording quality guides me to recommend the best quality available (CD or higher-quality downloads).

For anyone interested in the recorder as a central part of 20th-century and later chamber music, both this disc and A Garland for John McCabe form essential listening. Thank you, John Turner!. The discs reviewed point to Turner’s exceptional skills as a musicology researcher, bringing to our attention music we might well have not known otherwise.