R E V I E W S

If you enjoy Bartók’s ever-popular and nearly indestructible Romanian Folk Dances, and if you don’t OD easily on the rarified sound of the pan flute, you should enjoy these items by Herkenhoff and Parachkev Hadjiev (1912–1992). True, they’re slightly less spicy, slightly more aggressively genial, than their apparent model; but these suites of short pieces share the same deft folklorism, and, like the Bartók (in an uncredited arrangement), they are performed with superb phrasing (topped off with some exquisite pitch bending), a fine sense of rhythmic play (rubato is plentiful), and an astonishing level of sheer virtuosity (try the cadenza toward the end of Postcards). Matthias Keller’s Balkania, “dedicated to the victims of the Balkan genocide,” is, not surprisingly, more sustained and emotionally more challenging—it begins with reminiscences of some of the darker moments of the Concerto for Orchestra, and it gestures toward Sibelius’s Tapiola along the way as well. But it, too, is illuminated by lighter moments, as its bleak sorrow (built largely on a lullaby collected by ethnomusicologist Marcel Cellier) gives way, intermittently but only temporarily, to more uplifting episodes. Conductors and orchestra support the soloist well, as do the engineers, who—in the surround-sound tracks—provide a sonic image of remarkable three-dimensionality.

FANFARE: Peter J. Rabinowitz