Knussen reviews

Janet Craxton, who died in 1981, was the preeminent British oboist and oboe teacher of her time. Those of us lucky enough to have worked with her remember her supreme musicianship and her generous, humorous personality. Happily, her playing is preserved for later generations on an Oboe Classics disc of broadcasts by her London Oboe Quartet.

Elliott Carter's Late Works, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Oliver Knussen

'Astonishment seems the most natural response to these seven pieces, which are brimming with youthful energy and Haydnesque, impish wit'

Carter Interventions; Dialogues; Dialogues II; Soundings; Two Controversies and a Conversation; Instances; Epigrams

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano); Colin Currie (percussion); Isabelle Faust (violin); Jean-Guihen Queyras (cello); Birmingham Contemporary Music Group; BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oliver Knussen

Ondine ODE 1296-2

Knussen: Horn Concerto; Flourish with Fireworks; The Way to Castle Yonder (Suite from Higglety Pigglety Pop!); Two Organa; Music for a Puppet Court; Whitman Settings; '... upon one note'

One senses Oliver Knussen would have felt musically at home in Diaghilev’s circle in the early decades of this century. Much of the music written in the wake of his two fantastical operas, Where the Wild Things Are (1979-83) and Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1984-90), revels in the orchestral colours of Ravel, early Stravinsky and their ilk, as well as sumptuous added-note chords that give his music quite a French flavour.

Knussen: Songs without Voices; Whitman Settings; Hums and Songs of Winnie-the-Pooh; Océan de terre; Sonya's Lullaby

Uncompromisingly contemporary, the music of Oliver Knussen, though complex and challenging, is far from inaccessible. The seven chamber works on this retrospective disc span 20 years. The earliest is the eerie but powerfully atmospheric Océan de terre. Written in 1973, it is a three-movement setting for soprano (the excellent Lucy Shelton) and chamber orchestra of Apollinaire’s surreal poem. The most recent is Songs without Voices (1992), four short pieces for an ensemble of wind and strings.

Messiaen, Wolpe, Webern, Knussen, Lieberson, Takemitsu & Wuorinen

Peter Serkin has a fondness for recital programmes of jewel-like miniatures just like this disc. No other great pianist of our time can match his appetite for new music, which he plays with the same passion and musical perception he brings to the 18th- and 19th-century classics. This selection mingles works written for him – by Takemitsu, Knussen, Lieberson and Wuorinen – with masterpieces from earlier generations of 20th-century composers.

Holst, Oldham, Tippett, L Berkeley, Britten, Searle, Walton, Arnold, Hoddinott, Maw, Jones, G Williams, Tippett, Knussen, Saxton, Holloway, Weir, Goehr, C Matthews, Bedford

The notion of getting a group of composers to write a set of collaborative variations on a given theme is neither new nor British – Beethoven’s monumental Diabelli Variations began life as part of a similar project. But for some unexplained reason, the idea caught on in Britain after the Second World War. Three sets of composite variations are collected here – from the Fifties, Sixties and Eighties; and though the list of names in each case is hardly all-inclusive, they provide intriguing cross-sections of the nation’s new-musical life in their time.

Knussen: Higglety Pigglety Pop!; Where the Wild Things Are

Oliver Knussen’s double bill of one-act operas based upon Maurice Sendak’s imperishable children’s fables is among the finest achievements of British music theatre in the last quarter-century. There is no contemporary composer with a greater orchestral mastery than Knussen, and in this pair of exquisite works he matches the magic of Sendak’s illustrations with music of iridescent imagery, creating characters of memorable vividness: the heroine of Higglety Pigglety Pop!

Knussen: Hums and Songs of Winnie-the-Pooh; Songs without Voices; Whitman Settings; Océan de terre; Four Late Poems and an Epigram of Rainer Maria Rilke; Variations; Sonya's Lullaby

How pleasant to know Mr Knussen, and a welcome for the reissue of this excellent 20-year conspectus of his vocal, chamber and instrumental music. Yet the voice is central to almost everything here: nude and unadorned in the Rilke songs, equal partner with accompaniment in the Whitmans, layered into a chamber texture (Pooh, Océan de terre), or merely implied by piano (Sonya’s Lullaby) or ensemble (Songs without Voices).

Knussen reviews

Simon Rattle’s LSO directorial debut brilliantly captured in no-frills film

A marvellous orchestral tribute to Knussen and Henze

Mozart • Britten • Françaix • Knussen