Tailleferre Ensemble: There are Things to be Said
Ulysses Arts

Co-founded in 2019 by oboists Nicola Hands and Penelope Smith, Tailleferre Ensemble has issued an exemplary debut with There are Things to be Said, an eighty-minute collection that in the old days would make for a perfect double-vinyl release. Many things recommend the collection, from superb musicianship to an inspired and varied set-list. While the principal aim of this UK-based chamber outfit is to promote women in music, the recording includes female and male composers, and living as well as earlier ones too. Adding to the release's appeal, arrangements change throughout, with one piece performed by, say, two oboes and bassoon and another flute, oboe, and piano. That makes the presentation all the more stimulating.

The group, fleshed out by flautists Nicola Crowe and Emma Halnan, clarinetists Jennifer Dunsmore and Helen Pierce, bassoonist Amy Thompson, and pianist Lana Bode, named itself after Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983), who studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire and was the sole female member of the Paris-based group popularly known as “Les Six.” Fittingly, the release opens with Sonate Champêtre, which she wrote in 1972 and appears here in recorded form for the first time. Another première is Little Duos, dedicated by composer Rhian Samuel to the group's co-founders. The album takes its name, however, from Ingrid Stölzel's nine-minute title work that, drawing for inspiration from a poem by the late American poet Cid Corman, deals with life's struggles but also perseverance, hope, and resilience. Needless to say, all of the musicians bring to the group project extensive training and professional experience.

Scored for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and piano, Sonate Champêtre inaugurates the release on a rather neoclassical note, its light, breezy tone reflective of the circumstances under which it was created: during a summer holiday Tailleferre enjoyed in Brittany with her granddaughter and pets at the residence of a friend, fellow composer Henri Sauget. The pastoral setting's evoked in the lively first movement, the second exudes a lyrical air, and the rambunctious third lifts the spirits. Stölzer's There Are Things to be Said reinstates the contemplative character of the first work's central movement, progressing as it does from a brooding intro to an intense self-examination that's probing, pensive, and poetic and executed with scrupulous sensitivity by Crowe, Smith, and Bode.

Instantly engaging is Three Lyrical Pieces by bassoonist-pianist-composer Bill Douglas for its pastoral beauty and lyrical melodicism; that the material couples bassoonist Thompson with the ensemble's oboists only adds to the material's alluring quality. Inspired like much of the composer's work by natural landscapes, the work advances from the soothing “Wings of the Wind” to the poignant ache and affirmative embrace of “The Hills of Glencar” and “Autumn Song,” respectively. Like Stölzer's setting, Jenni Brandon's Metamorphosis is in a single movement, though nine sections are identified and whose titles, all synonyms for the word “metamorphosis,” reference stages of evolution. Performed by Bode, Hands, and Smith, Brandon's intoxicating material sings a song of adventure and self-discovery through the magnificent intertwining of the oboes. At twelve-and-a-half minutes, the work affords ample opportunity for exploration and provides a splendid showcase for the three players.

Pairing with Smith on Samuel's Little Duos, Hands exchanges oboe for cor anglais in a work that cedes the stage entirely to the ensemble co-founders. As expected, the two play off against each other spectacularly in all three parts, be it “Morning Glow,” where the two back each other's lead lines with drones when not voicing in unison or entangling acrobatically, or “Sentries,” whose competitive phrasings mirror the annual power struggle enacted between male pheasants outside the composer's mid-Wales home in the spring. Elsewhere, Ceclia McDowall's well-represented by Century Dances, which sees oboe, clarinet, and bassoon fluidly working through five exuberant dances of contrasting character, from a graceful “Allemande” and nimble “Mazurka” to a dark and sensual “Tango” and bluesy and funky “Last Dance.”

The ensemble caps the release with earlier compositions by German Baroque composer Melchior Hoffmann (1679-1715) and German-Dutch composer Julius Röntgen (1855-1932), who was born in Leipzig but later settled in Holland and founded the Amsterdam Conservatory. Hoffmann's four-part Trio Sonata in C minor moves quickly from an elegantly lilting opening adagio to a buoyant allegro, an even more enrapturing second adagio, and vivacious conclusion. Written in 1917 when Röntgen was living in Amsterdam, his Trio for Flute, Oboe and Bassoon in G Major, Op. 86 ends the release strongly with three substantial movements, from staccato phrases that intersect, alternate, and align in the “Allegro con spirito” to the contrapuntal elegance of the expressive “Poco Andante: Quasi Una Fantasia”' and high-spirited “Allegretto.”

March 2023