Opinion: Regal Recorders

Back in the '70s I bought a beautiful wooden soprano recorder complete with a how-to book - I believe it was "The Trapp Family Recorder Course." I learned to tootle out a couple of tunes: "Red River Valley" and "Edelweiss" (from "The Sound of Music," of course). However, I never put in the time and effort required to master the small instrument.

I was vaguely aware that the recorder held a place in Renaissance and Baroque music, and I had heard it featured in the works of Bach with "original instrumentation," something that was becoming popular back when I embarked on the Trapp family course.

But it wasn't until Saturday evening, when the Recorder Orchestra of New York paid a visit to the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor, that I realized the recorder has possibilities never dreamed of in the 16th century.

Back In Style

Apparently, so-called "early music" is enjoying a revival. You can go into a Borders Books and Music store and find a number of CDs featuring music and instruments that have in the past been relegated to the domain of bespectacled musicologists.

Things like the crumhorn and the shawm, precursors to the modern-day wind instruments, are reappearing, and recordings of vocal styles like the Gregorian chant have risen to the top of the charts. What accounts for this would have to be the subject of another article, but suffice it to say if you have a sackbut buried in your attic, now is the time to dig it out and dust it off.

It's more likely that you have a recorder kicking around somewhere because one of your kids may have brought one home from the elementary grades and accosted your ears with it during the primary school recorder craze some years ago. It seemed that someone decided that plastic recorders would be useful in teaching children to play music, but I think it may have fallen out of fashion when somebody finally realized that this is not really an easy instrument to play.

Master Players

And not an easy one to play well. The recorder requires a good deal of training in breath control and fingering. It has remarkable dynamic capabilities, and in the hands of a master can be an exciting instrument and certainly not one to be underestimated.

And so it is under the fingers of master players that the Recorder Orchestra of New York has teamed up to take the recorder out of kindergarten and onto the concert stage. Under the direction of Ken Andresen, the orchestra is one of only two performing recording orchestras in the United States.

Mr. Andresen is himself a recorder player and an arranger, and he was joined on Saturday night by 20 other Recorder Orchestra members playing a variety of recorders.

Spreading Out

The evening opened with Mr. Andresen's arrangement of "Music Divine" by Thomas Tomkins, a composer of the late Renaissance, and in this work we hear the recorder in its customary historical context.

After the piece, Mr. Andresen assured us that the Recorder Orchestra is not "relegated to what recorder players have been in the past: holders of the position of early music." Rather, he said, they have "spread to other kinds of music, and we'd like to think there's nothing we can't perform."

He emphasized that the evening's program was designed to reflect the range and versatility of the recorder. In "Midsummer," by Edward MacDowell, a 19th-century composer, a recorder was featured which towered over the rather tall man who was standing to play it. Next to him stood another performer working with a long boxlike instrument which resembled a birdhouse. These turned out to be contrabass recorders, the latter being one of recent design.

Like A Choir

Four alto recorders were featured in a concerto by Georg Philipp Telemann, a work of three movements in the standard fast, slow, fast form of the late Baroque and early Classical eras.

Mr. Andresen chose the next piece, "Ave Maris Stella" by Edvard Grieg, because "the realm of the Romantic was not touched by recorders in the past." In this arrangement by Norman Luff, who often adapts pieces for the Recorder Orchestra, the hymnlike quality in the opening was aptly carried off by all instruments. Each recorder voice rose and fell with gentle control through difficult dynamic and tonal ranges. It was as if the group became the Recorder Choir of New York. Lovely.

Mr. Andresen next had players demonstrate the various types of recorders, from the tiny soprano garklein to the contrabass, a physical range between six inches and six feet. The orchestra bravely attacked "Christus, der is mine Leben," an arrangement by Mr. Andresen of a chorale of J.S. Bach in which the full complement of recorders is illustrated.

Venture In Fun

Skipping ahead a few centuries, we were treated to what Mr. Andresen called "a venture in fun," a Dennis Bloodworth arrangement of "Tangerine." "I'm not sure this was meant to be played by recorder," said Mr. Andresen, "but we are going to do it anyway."

For my part, I'm not sure what the composer, Johnny Mercer, would have thought of it, because with the full company of recorders playing there was something reminiscent of a calliope in the result. But it was a bold move. Clearly, now that the recorder has broken out of the confines of 16th-century music, nothing will stop it.

After intermissions, we were back to the courtly style of recorder playing in William Byrd's madrigal "This Sweet and Merry Month of May," a return, as Mr. Andresen put it, to the "roots of the recorder."

Most Beautiful

This was followed by "Six Russian Folksongs" by Anatoli Liadov, wherein performers and instruments seemed to find a comfortable place. This was the most beautiful playing of the evening.

The arrangement by Friedrich Von Huene and Mr. Andresen allowed each recorder voice to sing rather than struggle as they seemed to do in some of the evening's works. The Russian songs were an audience favorite, and I hope Mr. Andresen will incorporate more such works in further performances of the orchestra.

He chose to follow this admirable selection with the disconcerting "Fuge aus der Geographie" ("Geographic Fugue") by the 20th-century composer Ernst Toch, a spoken work where orchestra members surrendered their instruments for musical "scripts" and pursued one another through seemingly endless recitations of names of cities and countries.

Jangled Nerves

This was a puzzling departure from recorder playing and I am at a loss to understand its inclusion in the program. Perhaps it was intended to show the versatility of the performers, but I was under the impression that it was the scope of the recorder that was the subject of the evening.

Nevertheless, we were snapped back to recorder reality with "Diligam Domine" by Jan Sweelink, another Norman Luff arrangement, which soothed my jangled nerves after the Toch piece.

The evening concluded with "After You've Gone," another attempt at jazz that left me feeling as if I had just departed a carnival midway. I was not so much disturbed by the un-recorderlike nature of the piece as I was by its selection as the last work of the evening. We may accept placing the recorder in new territory, but I think it is better to leave the audience with a more noble recorder resonance to carry away from a Recorder Orchestra performance.

A New World

The members of orchestra are to be commended for their masterful playing, but Mr. Andresen's fine stage presence did much to make the evening a success.

He evidently realizes that most audiences need to be educated about both the history of the recorder and the need to keep it on the musical scene. I admire the pluck of the orchestra in exploring new empires for the recorder, and the work of Mr. Andresen and other composers in arranging music for the instrument. It's a new world, and the recorder belongs in it.