When I started writing my cycle of twelve symphonies I definitely had in mind a concept which I had seen in operation in Germany where Dietrich Schnabel puts together with his orchestras concerts which on paper look very like symphony orchestra concerts. That is to say maybe 4 or 5 significant pieces of music. Maybe a little shorter than a symphony orchestra concert but in principle the same idea. And so it followed to me that there was room for significant pieces written very much in the mould of this type of piece. That is to say symphonies whose pattern and form have their language scale and form rooted in the music of composers who could never have written for recorder orchestra.
In some respects this has been a very successful concept but apart from in Germany, and one or two notable exceptions in UK, many of these pieces are being performed in concerts one movement at a time. This is partly because of the amount of rehearsal time needed and that some of the symphonies do call for big orchestras to work at their best.
And so my latest project has taken me to a different area. I have always said that I would never work in a Baroque style as Baroque composers could have written for recorders they had wanted to.
However I realised that apart from solo alto music and a few outings for other sizes of recorder, the recorder orchestra as we know it was not available to them. There are some notable arrangements of Baroque orchestral music for recorders but there are very few which to my mind really do the music as the composer intended it justice. For a number of reasons. I certainly have never been totally satisfied with any of the arrangements that I have done of baroque orchestral music. There are two basic reasons for making arrangements.
- The first that it makes music otherwise unavailable for an instrument accessible.
- The second that in doing so the arranger has revealed or added something to the music.
In the best of all possible worlds both of these conditions can be satisfied but unfortunately this is not universally the case.
So I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the ideas that Bach used in the Brandenburg concerti as regards the relationships too instruments. These of course are simply concerti for orchestra rather than concerti grossi.
I have tried to keep the joie de vivre of the original piece but write music which is conceived from the beginning as recorder music and thereby avoid the problems that I have always found satisfying myself with arranging Orchestral Baroque music.
S, A, T, T, T, B, B, B, GtB, GtB, GtB, CtB
Any similarity to J S Bach's third Brandenburg concerto is totally intentional! I do hope you enjoy it and don’t find the Christmas element of the last movement an obstacle Read more ...
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Sop, S, S, A, A, T, T, B, B, GtB, CtB
The second in my series - Bach wrote six, I might manage Read more ...
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Sop, S, S, A, A, T, T, B, B, B, GtB, CtB
The third in my series - I promise I will stop pestering Bach after this one. This is for normal conventional recorder orchestra although preferably one per Read more ...
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T, T, B, B, B, GtB, GtB, GtB, CtB, SubCtB
I had not intended to write a fourth Battenburg Concerto. This piece was written for Helen Hooker's Metro Orchestra (Mellow Tones Recorder Read more ...
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