Shop Now

Midlands Classical Music Making

The wind players of Bohemia have always had a deservedly fine reputation, think of Mozart’s delight at finding such brilliant clarinet players in Prague, and this splendidly played disc shows that the tradition is thriving.The versatile Czech Philharmonic Wind Ensemble have recorded music from Beethoven, Mozart and Dvorak to an album devoted to contemporary British music on 2024’s ‘Twisted Skyscape’. This new release is an eclectic one, of arrangements of pieces for woodwind orchestra by the Ensemble’s conductor Shea Lolin. It opens with the Octet Partita in F major, Op.57 by the prolific Moravian-born Franz Krommer, a huge favourite in Beethoven’s Vienna. Lolin fills out the musical textures but so subtly it sounds authentic Krommer and does the same for the youthful Richard Strauss’s Serenade (op.7) His arrangement of Cecile Chaminade’s Concertino, Op.107 of 1902 , originally for flute and piano and arranged by the composer for flute and full orchestra, sounds splendid in its new guise and gets a star solo role for Scottish flautist Fiona Sweeney. Despite Lolin’s ingenuity those familiar with the orchestral original of Constant Lambert’s ballet suite ‘Romeo and Juliet’ may miss the brassy swagger of the Sinfonia and the sighing strings of ‘The Death of Juliet’ but there is much to enjoy in Lolin’s wind textures and the band’s virtuosity. The final piece is British composer Guy Woolfenden’s ‘More Gordian Knots’, based on Purcell’s music for ‘The Gordian Knot Unty” which was composed for a theatrical work by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Lovers of wind music will relish this album.