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Fanfare

This is an entertaining collection of mainly 20th-century British music for recorder. There is nothing particularly modernist here. This is all conservative, tuneful music designed for the pleasure of recorder players and their audiences. The essentially lyrical quality of much of the music is leavened by some more lively pieces, some clearly inspired by Baroque dances.

The principal soloist and guiding force behind this disc is John Turner, an English recorder player who has also practiced as an attorney. He has also done a lot to promote his instrument and commissioned many of the pieces in this collection in order to increase the available repertoire. There is a bit of dry British humor encountered here. John McCabe’s Domestic Life, for example, is an arrangement of three tunes taken from his 1969 “entertainment,” titled This Town’s a Corporation Full of Crooked Streets. The last of the three sounds humorously like “Yankee Doodle.” At the other end of the emotional spectrum is David Ellis’s Mount Street Blues, a touching tribute composed in 2015 in memory of McCabe, who died that year. Turner adopts an appropriately darker coloring here.

This would be a more gratifying collection were Turner more skilled at establishing a firm legato. Mount Street Blues is one example, but there are many where the articulation of each note is too clear and strong. Moreover, there is a sameness of sound that sets in fairly early. A contributing cause is that so much the music exists in a narrow dynamic range, not too loud, not too soft. I don’t know a lot about what is possible on the recorder, but in my listening experience a greater range of color and dynamics is possible than what we have here.

Along with these specific issues, there is the harder-to-define issue of personality. Everything on these two discs is pleasant, but nothing captivated my attention. I hate to make such a damning judgment, but the fact is that this release would make for moderately interesting background music at a cocktail party. It is pleasant and tonal, not too intrusive, occasionally lighthearted, but rarely riveting. Pianist Stephen Bettany’s accompaniments are fine, as is the recorded sound.