Oboist Anna Durance's new EP contains just two short pieces of three and a half minutes each: Matthew Kaner's solo Flight Studies: The Snowy Owl (part of a series of ‘flight’ solo woodwind pieces) and Héloïse Werner's oboe and cello duo Double Incantation, with cellist Louise McMonagle. It is, in a sense, a short showcase for the excellent Durance – a player with a rich sound and an expressive sense of line and phrase. Both works, though, are strangely old-fashioned despite Werner's bends and air/whisper sounds. Kaner's quasi-programmatic owl character study piece is particularly so, even ‘English’ in that 1960s ‘cow pat’ sort of way (a nod to Elisabeth Lutyens), with perhaps a hint of the style and approach of the cornerstone of the solo repertory, Britten's 1951 Six Metamorphoses. Maybe it's an oboe thing. Many composers, past and present, seem to have perpetuated the espressivo minor-key melancholy, unable to resist the oboe's ‘idiomatic’ lure. But then I think of Holliger playing things like Globokar's Atemstudie or his own Studie über Mehrklänge, or more recently a handful (and it is only a handful compared to the clarinet and flute) of more experimental individuals (in this country, for example, the extraordinary playing of Chris Redgate) and I feel reassured that the oboe is not really woodwind's lost cause. Kaner's approachable and ‘playable’ piece will, I'm sure, be useful and welcome among young players wanting to move away from core repertory. The duo, unlike Werner's own wonderfully experimental and adventurous singing, is disappointingly and, I suppose, surprisingly traditional. With its rather incessant rising tone motive passed between the two, and an ill-judged sudden ending modulation of the same tone, it comes over as the beginning of something more substantial and still in its early sketch days.
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