Next concert, Saturday 23rd September 2023 11am - 12 noon

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 French music for oboe and piano lies at the heart of the oboe repertoire. In this their third album, Catherine Tanner-Williams and Christopher Williams present the famous oboe sonatas of Saint-Saëns, Poulenc and Dutilleux alongside their own brand-new transcriptions of well-known arias from Bizet's Carmen, including the Habanera "L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” - Love is a rebellious bird. The oboe's vocal quality also shines in Brod's Fantasie on the Mad Scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Ravel's Pièce en forme de Habanera. The disc includes the neglected Fantasies of Henri Dallier and Blai (Blas) Maria Colomer, and world premiere recordings of the Nocturne and Impromptu by Louise-Marie Simon, (who wrote under the pseudonym Claude Arrieu). 

Sponsored by Marigaux, Paris.

BUY NOW  at Willowhayne Records 

LISTEN on SPOTIFY  IDAGIO  AppleMusic

The launch concert is on February 11th 2023, Insole Court, Cardiff.
https://www.insolecourt.org/events/love-is-a-rebellious-bird

" Requiem is simply gorgeous. What Edwards and Cohen do so well is present the listener with something as  deceptively simple as a piano loop overlaid with a well-sung story before surprising us by introducing one of my  favourite musical instruments, namely the classical oboe, played with aplomb here by Catherine Tanner-Williams.  Delicate, but powerful, I rather wish this were a longer track"
http://www.progarchives.com/Review.asp?id=2592538

" The graceful piano is an exquisite foil for Rachel’s voice on the cut glass refinement of Requiem before the gloriously whimsical oboe interjects. Just under four  minutes of wonderment that will lift you onto a higher plane, a  bewitching piece of music. "
https://www.progradar.org/index.php/2021/09/02/review-three-colours-dark-loves-lost-property/

" Catherine Tanner-Williams meanwhile brings oboe to the sweet Requiem. "
https://musipediaofmetal.blogspot.com/2021/09/reviews-picturebooks-robert-jon-wreck.html

An (almost!) World Premiere recording of Arnold Cooke's two oboe sonatas, the World Premiere recording of Richard Elfyn Jones's Spanish flavoured Oboe Sonata- 'Viva Altea!', and World Premiere recordings of Luminous and Darkness Falling with Birdsong  by oboist and composer Catherine Tanner-Williams.

This album brings together oboe music by three composers who are linked by the premiering of each other's works.

Although the British Library lists recordings of radio broadcasts made by Evelyn Rothwell and Sarah Francis, made in the late 1980's, no recordings of Arnold Cooke's lyrical oboe sonatas have been commercially available. Now finally, for the first time in this new recording by Catherine Tanner-Williams and her husband Christopher Williams, they will be released on CD, download and streaming.

Reviews:

"The ensemble playing between both players is extremely good...both musicians also shine individually...Catherine's singing oboe tone, good control of high notes and rich sounding lower register stand out...lovely natural and balanced concert hall feel"

- Sarah Roper, Double Reed News

https://artmusiclounge.wordpress.com/2020/03/22/catherine-williams-plays-oboe-sonatas/

" I wanted to  review this CD primarily because I was quite impressed, in other  releases, with the music of Arnold Cooke, who wrote two of the three  sonatas presented here. I was not disappointed in that respect. From the  very opening of the Sonata for Oboe & Harpsichord or Piano, played  here on the latter instrument, I was impressed by the late British  composer’s intelligence and ingenuity. Cooke’s music, for those who  haven’t heard it, is conventional in its use of form and rhythm but  highly imaginative in his use of harmony. The music is primarily bitonal  rather than atonal; by using rootless chords and constantly shifting  the harmony around as the piece progresses, Cooke was able to convey an  essentially lyrical mood without boring the listener with ordinary chord  patterns, and his liveliness of rhythm here gives the music a rather  upbeat feeling despite the constantly shifting chords. Even within the  first movement, there are also general tempo changes from slow to fast,  then back and forth again as the music develops.

The second  movement is quite pastoral, and the harmony Cooke set up almost sounds a  bit Oriental, though this feeling also shifts and changes as the music  develops. Catherine Tanner Williams’ bright, penetrating tone is perfect  for this music. Her pianist-husband, Christopher Williams, is also a  fine musician though I felt that his contribution was a bit more generic  in feeling. The last movement of this sonata is whimsical in a  devil-may-care sort of way, the music obviously meant to entertain the  listener as well as engage his or her mind in the shifting harmonies.

The second  Cooke sonata here was written in 1957 for the famed British virtuoso  Leon Goossens. The opening movement is extremely tuneful, again, in the  solo oboe line, emphasizing the pure legato for which Goossens was  famous. Hearing these two sonatas back-to-back, however, one notes a  sameness in both material and rhythm in their first movements, which  sound as if they stemmed from the exact same template or sketches. The  second movement, however, is quite different from its successor, being  in a more regular pulse and lacking the Orientalisms of the later work.  This third movement, though also somewhat playful, is a bit meatier in  its use of material and less airy-whimsical despite a similar tempo.  Parts of it are set in 6/8, with almost the feel of British folk dances,  albeit with far more sophisticated harmony lifts it above that genre.

Following the  Cooke works is the oboe sonata of one Richard Elfyn Jones, a Welsh  composer who, to my ears, follows in the footsteps of Cooke as a  composer. My ears told me, however, that his music is much more glib and  less substantial overall than Cooke’s, and this was in part confirmed  by the credits that list him as a composer of music for the Maryland PBS  TV series After the Warming and Timeline. Once you  step into the worlds of TV or movie score writing, your style becomes  compromised in the sense that you begin writing more populist and less  purely artistic works. Not that this oboe sonata is a bad work; it’s  just very predictable in how the music goes when compared to Cooke’s  pieces. I did, however, like the third movement, titled “Barullo!,” very  much indeed. It has a sort of Latin jazz swagger to it that is  infectious along with interesting harmonic changes, and Tanner Williams  is fully up to the challenge—rare for a classically-trained oboist.

Williams’ own piece, Luminous, is  a surprisingly original upbeat number using lively, fast-paced  eighth-note figures that rise and fall in thirds as the music goes  through several harmonic changes, then falls back to a lyrical interlude  before resuming its rapid, serrated little path with variations. In  this piece, too, Christopher Williams sounded livelier and more fully  engaged. At 4:35 the music slows down and in fact comes to a dead stop  before resuming its jolly pace in the finale. Williams throws in a  swinging passage in more relaxed tempo just before the final chord.

Darkness Falling With Birdsong is  one of those nature pieces which hope to capture the feeling one gets  from observing everyday events in the earth’s cycle. It’s a very nice  little piece, pastoral and warm, with a relaxed feeling about it.

This is one of  those rarities, an oboe recital that is uplifting and entertaining in  addition to presenting some very good music. I like it overall.

—© 2020 Lynn René Bayley"