Andriessen reviews

Louis Andriessen has never been one to waste his prodigious intellectual resources on ephemera or the incidental. Since bursting onto the world stage in the 1970s with an ebulliently aggressive, Marx- and bebop-inspired minimalism, his palette has further expanded to embrace a cornucopia of styles; often within the same piece, but seamlessly integrated and focused like a laser on profound questions of humanity. 

That tough-minded minimalist Louis Andriessen here ventures into more personal territory, taking on the agonised memoirs of Spanish writer Anaïs Nin. These reveal her torrid affairs with four men: Antoine Artaud, Henry Miller, René Allendy and her father, the Spanish composer Joaquín Nin, with whom she had an incestuous relationship.

Oboe Classics is a new British-based label designed, like Clarinet Classics and Cello Classics before it, to focus on a single instrument, its repertoire and its performers. It has made a bright start with a well-varied first batch of releases, attractively presented with a clear design identity, and with generally helpful notes supplemented by further material accessible via its website (www.oboeclassics.com). Most of this is the work of the label’s founder Jeremy Polmear, who (like his clarinet and cello counterparts) is also no slouch as a performer.